Venezuelans go to the polls on Sunday against a backdrop of hope and fear in a presidential election that could end 25 years of socialist rule – if a free and fair vote is allowed. Opinion polls suggest that the president Nicolás Maduro, 61, who is seeking his third term, could be defeated by the opposition coalition candidate, retired diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia, 74. But experts warn that it is one thing for González to gain more votes, and another is for him to be announced as winner by the National Electoral Council, which is aligned with Maduro’s government. Independent observers describe this election as the most arbitrary in recent years, even by the standards of an authoritarian regime that started with Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Maduro has been in power since the death of his mentor, Chávez. He was narrowly elected that year, and his re-election in 2018 was widely dismissed as a sham. Irregularities in the current election range from barring candidacies and detaining opposition members to changing polling locations and preventing voters at home and abroad from registering. “Establishing fair and free elections within an authoritarian regime is impossible,” said Jesús Castellanos, a consultant at Electoral Transparency, an NGO. “To start with: fair elections assume that all parties have the opportunity to register their candidates,” he said. Reuters journalists located in six cities around the country on Sunday reported queues outside polling stations, including some that opened late. “I’ve been here since 5am. I came to vote for change, for a new Venezuela, which will be reborn and because I’m a public worker and we need change to be able to have a dignified salary,” said Tibisay Aguirre, a 57-year-old cook in Maracay, in the central state of Aragua. Alejandro Sulbarán nabbed the first spot at his voting centre by getting in line at 5pm on Saturday. He said he stood outside an elementary school in a hillside suburb of the capital, Caracas, for “the future of the country.” “We are all here for the change we want,” Sulbarán, 74, who runs a maintenance business, told the Associated Press. Polls close at 6pm local time (2200 GMT) and results could be published on Sunday night or in the following days. González was not the first choice for anti-Maduro activists. The opposition coalition’s most prominent figure, former legislator María Corina Machado, 56, won the primary in October with more than 90% of the 2.3m votes. But she was barred from running by a senior court loyal to Maduro – as was her replacement, the academic Corina Yoris. Within days, the coalition made a new pick, and the soft-spoken retired diplomat González Urrutia was plunged onto the country’s political front lines. Machado, a charismatic public speaker, has stayed on the campaign trail, criss-crossing the country to appear at rallies drawing thousands nationwide, despite constant harassment by the authorities who have arrested dozens of opposition figures, including her own head of security, who was held for 24 hours. “María Corina Machado has become a national sensation,” said Ignacio Ávalos, a director at the Venezuelan Electoral Observatory (VEO), an independent group. “We told our observers to attend every rally from all candidates … When they went to Machado’s, they all agreed that it’s a phenomenon that hadn’t been seen since Chávez,” he said. The government has denied accreditation for VEO, but some 700 volunteer observers will independently monitor the polling stations today. But there will be virtually no international monitoring. UN and Carter Center observers have been allowed, but their roles will be limited. European Union observers were disinvited by Maduro, as were teams from countries whose governments have previously been seen as sympathetic to Maduro. Argentina’s leftwing former president Alberto Fernández, said he was disinvited after saying that Maduro should accept the result if defeated. The Brazilian Electoral Court decided not to send observers after Maduro claimed that the elections in Brazil were “not audited”. Those comments were seen as a riposte to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, who criticised Maduro for claiming Venezuela would “fall into a bloodbath” if the opposition wins. Castellanos said such threats are themselves a form of electoral violence: “Since the campaign began, we’ve seen a significant number of arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, persecution of media and journalists.” According to Foro Penal, an NGO, 102 opposition members were arrested in 2024. But persecuting the opposition is not the only method the government has employed to tilt the electoral battlefield in its favour, said Ávalos, and that the Maduro administration has enacted “a clear strategy to reduce turnout”. Nearly 22 million Venezuelans are registered to vote, but only a fraction of the 8 million who have fled the country since 2014 will have a say in Sunday’s election. In theory, around 5 million exiles are eligible to vote, but the government stopped registering out-of-country voters in 2018 and only reopened registration in March. Since then, only about 500 people have been added to the 69,000 voters who had registered before 2018, rights groups say. Some travelled thousands of kilometres to the nearest Venezuelan embassy, but even that was no guarantee of success. “Of all the people I spoke to, none who went to the embassy in Brasília managed to update their voting information,” said William Clavijo, 34, founder of the NGOVenezuelans In Brazil, who has lived in Rio de Janeiro since 2024.He estimated that, of the 500,000 Venezuelans living in Brazil, only around a thousand were able to vote. “We know why the government has made no effort to ensure that people could participate: most Venezuelans abroad had to leave due to the crisis or are victims of civil rights violations and would vote against Maduro,” he said. Even within Venezuela, some voters have reportedly found that their polling stations have been unexpectedly moved – in some cases to other states. Opposition activists argue that such maneouvring is part of a strategy to suppress votes for González, who independent polls show with a lead of at least 20 percentage points over Maduro. Ballot papers will feature Maduro’s picture 13 times, reflecting the number of parties he is representing; González will appear just once – another tactic to bamboozle voters, the opposition says. Despite all the challenges, those who want change are still hopeful. “It feels like the first time in a long time that we’ve had a real hope,” said Thabata Molina, a Venezuelan journalist who has lived in Spain since 2021 and attended a pro-change rally in Madrid last week. “It’s not just the people who’ve always been against the regime; there are a lot of people who were Chavistas for years who are now feeling hopeless and impatient for a drastic change that will improve things in Venezuela.” Clavijo said many Venezuelans are already planning to return home if González succeeds. “We simply want to live in a democratic country again. We want to feel once more that the country belongs to us – something we have never stopped feeling, but we want to recover it.”