Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who is running for re-election in the upcoming presidential elections, has officially submitted his candidacy to the National Electoral Council (CNE), which is accused by many of taking orders from the government and wanting to block opposition candidates, with led by Maria Korina Machado.

“I swear to you, to my mother, to my father, to the Holy Trinity, that on July 28 (when the presidential elections will be held, in one round), the day of Comandante Chávez’s 70th birthday, we will defeat them again,” he said Maduro, dressed in the colors of the Venezuelan flag, after submitting the nomination of his party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). “The people have a plan, the people have the power, the people have a candidate, Nicolas Maduro Moros, (spiritual) child of Chávez,” he added.

The deadline for submitting nominations is tonight at midnight local time. The main opposition coalition has not yet managed to register its candidate.

“I was moved by so much generosity and recognition from the people to this humble people from the barrios of Caracas, to this humble worker,” Maduro continued, speaking for himself in the third person and asserting that thousands of people begged him to run again.

Maduro was accompanied to the CNE by thousands of his supporters, many dressed in red and rhythmically chanting his name.

More than 60 countries, including the US, did not recognize his re-election in 2018 elections, which were boycotted by the opposition. Economic sanctions were also imposed, mainly on the country’s oil sector, which has the largest deposits of black gold on the planet.

Maria Corina Machado comfortably won the primaries of the Democratic United Platform (PUD) coalition, but was declared “ineligible” as she was accused by the government of corruption and of supporting a foreign invasion, which she denies. In order to remove the obstacle, last Friday she chose as her replacement an unknown candidate, Corina Ioris, a philosopher and university professor, 80 years old. “We will fight this battle together,” said Machado, who remains the “face” of the opposition’s election campaign.

So far, however, the PUD has not managed to submit the candidacy of Yoris because, as it says, it does not have the necessary access codes to the CNE website. Manuel Rosales, the governor of the State of Julia who was also a candidate in the 2006 presidential elections, has also failed to register.

Many analysts consider it likely that the CNE will not accept nominations that might displease the authorities. He could therefore block the candidacy of Yoris, as happened with Machado. Yoris, in a press conference she gave earlier today, said that her rights as a citizen of the country are being violated because they do not allow her to submit her candidacy and assured that her colleagues went to the CNE headquarters in person to find a solution.

Currently, nine nominations have been submitted, but the opposition says that these are “scorpions”, i.e. “collaborators” of the government. The final list of candidates will be announced at the end of April.