An official delegation of MPs from Spain’s centre-right Partido Popular (PP) have been deported from Venezuela.
The group headed by PP MEP and vice president of the European Parliament, Esteban González Pons, and the PP Parliamentary Spokesman, Miguel Tellado, had landed in the country but were returned to Spain over the weekend of July 27 after being detained at the Caracas airport.
Among the delegation was the PP MP Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo.
According to González Pons, the PP was invited by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado to observe the electoral process.
Venezuelan electoral authorities said current leader Nicolás Maduro was re-elected with 51 per cent of the vote. US and European authorities are questioning the result.
The Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed the PP had requested permission ahead of their travelling to Venezuela.
The PP’s Secretary General and MP, Cuca Gamarra, accused Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government of “sharing Maduro’s discourse instead of defending its expelled compatriots”.
Gamarra added that the PP “went to [Venezuela] to observe.”
“And we observed a dictatorship that is rotting and is falling,” she added.
The PP also noted that former Socialist Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — a long-time ally of the Venezuelan Government — was allowed into the country.
Gamarra called Zapatero a “defender of the chavista regime”.
The PP’s decision to go to Venezuela was criticised by others on the right-wing, including the Conservative VOX party, marking another sign of a split between these former partners at the regional level.
VOX MEP Jorge Martín Frías suggested the PP’s presence in Venezuela validated the “electoral fraud” of the election.
“It is shameful that the PP had to actually go to Venezuela to be able to affirm that its citizens are hostage of a narco dictatorship and that there are ‘serious indications of an elections with no guarantees’,” he said.
VOX president, Santiago Abascal had denounced earlier that Sunday’s elections were a “planned fraud by the tyrant Maduro”.
Martín Frías also called out the PP for not having called the election a “fraud.”
He added that “for more than 20 years” the Venezuelan regime had been committing these types of “frauds”.
On Sunday, about 9,000 people gathered in Madrid’s Columbus Square to protest against the Maduro government, according to officials.
