Maduro revokes the invitation to his ally Alberto Fernández to be election observer

Alberto Fernández, former president of Argentina, informed that the Venezuelan National Electoral Council revoked an invitation he had received to be an observer of the elections to be held next Sunday in the country.

Fernández, who in his administration was an ally of Nicolás Maduro, explained that "yesterday, the Venezuelan national government conveyed to me its will that I should not travel and desist from fulfilling the task that had been entrusted to me by the National Electoral Council."

In addition, he highlighted that the decision was made due to his comments saying that Nicolás Maduro must accept if he loses the electoral process.

"The reason given to me is that, in the opinion of that government, public statements made by me before a national media caused discomfort and generated doubts about my impartiality. They understood that the coincidence with what the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had expressed a day before, generated a sort of destabilization of the electoral process," highlighted Fernández.

In this sense, Fernández maintained that he does not understand the reasons the Venezuelan dictatorship revoked the invitation. He maintained that he only expressed what should happen in a democracy.

"I only said that in a democracy, when the people cast their vote, 'whoever wins, wins and whoever loses, loses' and if the ruling party is eventually defeated, it should accept the popular verdict. The same should be done by the opposition in the event of an adverse result," highlighted Fernández.

The former Argentine president urged Nicolás Maduro on Tuesday to accept the result in case he loses the elections to be held in the country on July 28.

"If [Maduro] is defeated, what he has to do is accept, as [Brazilian President Luiz Inacio] Lula [da Silva] said, "He who wins, wins, and he who loses, loses." ... I'm going to do what they asked me to do, to be an observer of the elections so that everything works well," Fernandez said in a radio interview about the Venezuelan elections.

"What Venezuela needs is to recover its democratic coexistence and that those who are wandering around the world because they left the country for whatever reason can return," added Fernandez about the almost 8 million Venezuelans who emigrated from the country in the last decade, according to the U.N.