The Venezuelan opposition still hopes for the overthrow of Maduro despite the exile of its candidate

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado sought to reassure her supporters on Monday that her coalition still hopes to control the presidency despite the departure of its candidate Edmundo González Urrutia into exile.

Machado's group claims it has evidence that González won the July 28 presidential election by a wide margin against Venezuela's authoritarian incumbent Nicolás Maduro, even though Maduro himself claimed he had won.

At an online meeting of opposition leaders, reporters and others on Monday, Machado said her group still hopes Maduro will leave office in January, but that hope has seemed increasingly faint to voters since González decided to flee into exile in Spain over the weekend.

She said the former diplomat could take on the role of opposition candidate “with much greater protection and security” from abroad. She herself has gone into hiding in the weeks since the election, while Maduro's government arrested more than 2,000 people and cracked down on demonstrations against the election results across the country.

“Nothing has changed,” she insisted from an unknown location in Venezuela.

González, 75, landed at a military airport near Madrid on Sunday, accompanied by his wife and Spanish officials. His departure was announced late Saturday by the Venezuelan government, which had ordered his arrest a few days earlier.

González had not been seen in public since the week after the election, when he and Machado announced not only that their campaign team had received the vote counts from more than two-thirds of the electronic voting machines used in the election, but that they had also published them online to show the world that Maduro had lost the election.

Their claims stunned supporters and critics alike, as the National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner just hours after polls closed, granting him a third six-year term that will begin on January 10. The body, which is staffed by ruling party supporters, never released detailed vote tallies that could have supported Maduro's claim of victory.

González had never run for office before the presidential election. The leadership of the opposition Unity Platform coalition had chosen him as a candidate after the government barred Machado from running and prohibited its hand-picked successor from registering to vote.

Machado became his main deputy and they campaigned together.

González said in a statement on Monday that he was not motivated by “personal ambitions.” He wrote that he remained committed to “realizing the will of the people,” but did not explain how he would continue to work toward that goal.

“My commitment is not based on personal ambition, this decision is a gesture that reaches everyone and I hope it will be reciprocated as such,” said González.

Machado told reporters that González is “the elected president of Venezuela,” regardless of his whereabouts, and will remain so “until the day he is sworn in as president.” She did not reveal details about the strategy that could lead to that outcome.

Experts from the United Nations and the Carter Center, which observed the election at the invitation of the Maduro government, concluded that the results announced by the electoral authorities were not credible.

In a critical statement on the election, the UN experts did not confirm the opposition's victory, but stated that the group's voting results published on the Internet appeared to have all the original security features.