An unknown retiree is challenging Venezuela’s strongman—and leading big in polls

livemint.com:

A few months ago, Edmundo González’s life in retirement consisted of academic conferences, visiting old friends and playing with grandchildren at his Caracas high-rise. Few in Venezuela knew him. Now, the soft-spoken 74-year-old is the opposition’s presidential candidate in the July 28 election and what analysts say could be a last hope for democracy in a country ruled for 11 years by the strongman he is challenging, President Nicolás Maduro.

González has never run for office, but polls give the former career diplomat a whopping 20-point advantage over Maduro, who is seeking a third six-year term. The same polls show Maduro is widely reviled for driving the oil-rich nation to ruin and leading a quarter of the population—some eight million people—to flee the country. “I’d never done party politics, nor been in a popular election before," González said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“This is all completely new to me." Venezuela’s normally fractious opposition came together to rally around González as a third-string choice after María Corina Machado, a charismatic pro-business politician who garnered 90% of the votes in a primary last year, was banned by the regime from running. So was her handpicked replacement. The government never explained why it let González run.

His face now appears on the ballot as the candidate for three opposition parties, crammed among 13 boxes with images of Maduro and a handful of other candidates with little support in polls. On the ballot, Maduro’s face appears 13 times while González appears three times, alongside a handful of other candidates with little support in polls. But González’s commanding lead may not be enough to bank on when the vote in Venezuela is neither free nor