President Maduro: EU demand to delay election in Venezuela 'impossible'

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has dismissed as "impossible" the EU's suggestion to postpone the country’s December 6 election to meet the bloc’s conditions to dispatch an observer mission, blaming the idea on US pressure.

"It is impossible because there is a very clear constitutional mandate," Maduro said Thursday in a nationally televised address. "We want to have a good relationship with the European Union, but Washington does not let them."

Maduro has repeatedly maintained that the administration of hawkish US President Donald Trump is persistently plotting to topple his government in a coup to seize control of the oil-rich nation’s huge crude oil reserves.

Relations between Caracas and Washington have drastically deteriorated in recent years amid multiple efforts by the US regime to impose sanctions on Venezuela’s state oil company and other industries in its bid to destabilize the country.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza invited observers from the United Nations and the European Union, in letters addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Borrell early this month, to monitor the upcoming parliamentary elections in the country.

In the letters, Arreaza outlined “the broad electoral guarantees agreed for the upcoming parliamentary elections.”

SS