VENEZUELA: Presidential Elections Scheduled For April 22

(RTTNews) - Venezuela's Electoral Council (CNE) chairwoman, Tibisay Lucena, announced that the presidential elections in the country would be held on April 22.

"The National Electoral Council has been in permanent session, since Monday, analyzing the dates and working on different scenarios and schedules.Today we decided, and the presidential elections are scheduled for April 22, 2018," she said during a press conference in Caracas.

The announcement comes amid a climate of disagreement between the government and the opposition over the elections. While the government signed a pre-agreement reached last week, and that included holding elections in the next few months, the opposition dodged to sign the pact.

Instead, the opposition demanded, among other things, that the government lift the political disqualifications to the two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles and Leopoldo López, opposition leader under house arrest, and that the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), which was created as a loose coalition of opposition parties, be recognized as a party.

Julio Borges, the opposition spokesman in the talks, claimed that the government did not attend a meeting yesterday and that he has not even received the proposal following the comments they submitted.

Maduro, for his turn, noted that "if the opposition does not want to take part [in the elections] and they want to sabotage, we are going to teach them a lesson with more than 10 million votes. If they dare to call abstention, we will give them a historical struggle, with or without the opposition, we will triumph in the presidential elections," he said in a rally.

Both the Secretary of State of the United States, Rex Tillerson, and the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, said this week that "it will be impossible for Colombia, and I think that for many democratic countries like the Lima Group members, to recognize any result, of the Venezuelan elections."

A few months ago, the anticipation of the presidential election was among the main demands of the Venezuelan opposition to Maduro's administration.