To take you straight to some pictures from Caracas, we're looking at pictures of the riot police who've just taken to the streets in the capital. We've been watching for the last hour, actually more and more people coming out onto the streets of Caracas. We've seen tires being burned on the bridges. We've seen a motorcycle rally going through the city center. You can see there some of the protesters out on that bridgehead there throwing stones at the, the riot police. And we were warned earlier in the program that there would be more unrest over the election results. Over the weekend, Nicolas Maduro declaring himself the winner of the presidential election. The government controlled electoral authority claimed Maduro won 51% of the vote, compared with 44% for his rival, the former diplomat Edmondo Gonzalez. But it's been met with some skepticism in Washington.

We have serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the venezuelan people. It's critical that every vote be counted fairly and transparently, that election officials immediately share information with the opposition and independent observers without delay, and that the electoral authorities publish the detailed tabulation of votes.

Some latin american countries, including Colombia, which has friendly ties to Maduro, also expressed skepticism of the results, as did Spain, Italy and other european nations. In the last few hours, protests have been erupting as you've been seeing in Caracas and in other parts of the country. We got this reaction from the former presidential candidate, Alejandro Pena Esclusa, who was jailed by Hugo Chavez and now lives here in Europe in exile.

This will continue until Maduro accepts his defeat. The people in Venezuela is enraged. They're very. Not only sad, but they are enraged, as I said before, because they've been robbed. The population knows that Mado was defeated in a huge slime like process. So nobody likes him anymore. He has created a humanitarian crisis. The third of your population of Venezuela, 8 million Venezuelans, have to flee out of the country. So he's not giving any solutions. And everybody knows he robbed the elections. So people in Venezuela are in the streets and they're going to continue to be in the streets. And I believe that also more international protests will start to come in. So the combination of international resistance and national resistance will make it impossible for Maduro to stay in power much longer.

Seema, we've been here before and we've seen things like this in Caracas before, where people come out onto the street to protest an election result or to protest against a member of the opposition not being allowed to run. And very often it is put down violently. What do you think might be different this time?

I think it's an open question. What happens? We've certainly seen a rise in authoritarianism around the world. We've seen a rise in election denial. I mean, we saw what happened in the United States after the 2020 election, the insurgency of the Capitol. So, I mean, it's such a volatile situation and it also has direct implications for the United States because of the number of people who have Fleda under Maduro, under Chavez, who have immigrated to the United States, which has caused a crisis at the border. So it has so many ramifications for not just the nations directly surrounding it, but for the whole world.

Does the White House have any leverage over the situation?

I think they're trying to keep eyes on it, but I think it's just really so unpredictable right now.

What's going to happen if Mister Maduro Peter can ride out the turmoil, the post election turmoil, and cling on to office? What sort of message does that send to, to other buddy autocrats in the region?

It is for the world, not a good message in that. Even to people watching in the UK, where the connections to politics there are quite slim. It's very obvious from the news reports that something extremely dodgy is up. The fact that the election results started to come in hours later than they were meant to, there was no reason for it. They were just told, we'll give you the results as soon as they come in. So it's a fairly blatant attempt, seemingly to fix the election. And it's the kind of thing that there's no good way out because he doesn't look like he's going to step down quickly. So you might have violence for a long period, which then means that he steps down. But as you say, if he then manages to cling on, he will stay close to the people who indulge that kind of thing, and countries which won't really be able to change anything, but the message will be to tyrants around the world. You can perhaps get away with this.

Yeah, you get the impression just looking at these pictures, incidentally, we're now seeing lined ranks of riot police with batons marching down the street, that they want to nip this in the butt as quickly as possible. Because there will be a feeling, I guess, around the Morauro team that if this gets a hole in the next 24, 48 hours, they won't be able to stop it. But certainly while we've been watching and while we've been bringing these pictures to you, more and more people have been coming out onto the streets in the last few hours, and it would appear the center of Caracas there to be getting more violent as well.