“The Venezuelan Constitution is very clear and, indeed, establishes that in the event of absolute failure, and no one can doubt that there is an absolute failure of Mr. Nicolás Maduror, in the next 30 days, elections must be called,” Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said in an interview with AFP in Paris, for whom this call should be “as soon as possible.”
The opposition demands that interim president Delcy Rodríguez call a presidential election to fill the vacancy in office following the capture of Nicolás Maduro by US forces on January 3. A protest by unions is planned for this Thursday to support the call.
However, Machado specified that calling does not mean celebrating them immediately. First, he advocated for the appointment of a new National Electoral Councilmade up of people without “political ties”, and to update the registry, since “40% of Venezuelans with the right to vote are not registered”, among them are those who left the country.
Meeting with Macron and with the president of the French Senate
“All this takes time and we estimate the sequence of all these actions to be around nine months, from the moment a new National Electoral Council is appointed,” said Machado, in a video conference with AFP from Paris, where he met the day before with the president, Emmanuel Macron.
Machado also met this Tuesday in Paris with the president of the French Senate, Gérard Larcherto speak precisely about the democratic transition in the Latin American country and the need to establish an electoral calendar in 2026. In both meetings, Machado was accompanied by political scientist and professor Pedro Urruchurtu, advisor Isadora Zubillaga and lawyer Antonio Ledezma.
Machado left Venezuela in December to collect the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, with the promise of returning and, although he assured that he will do so “soon,” he refused to confirm an exact date. He specified that he still has “goals to meet” with meetings with the diaspora, “potential investors” and political leaders.
For Chavismo, it is not “peremptory” to define a date for elections
To date, Venezuelan authorities have left the electoral issue in the background, after prioritizing the economy. Delcy Rodríguez governs under strong pressure from US President Donald Trump, who has said he is in charge of Venezuela and the sale of its oil. And he is advancing an agenda of legislative reforms to open the country with the largest proven crude oil reserves in the world to foreign investment.
“Now they are calling for elections because there is the absolute absence of President Nicolás Maduro. Well, you told us that Nicolás Maduro did not win and how is it that now they are asking for the absolute absence of someone who did not win,” the head of the Venezuelan Interior, Diosdado Cabello, ironically said yesterday, Maduro’s last powerful minister who remains in power.
On March 2, the president of Parliament, Jorge Rodríguez, brother of the interim president, also indicated that it was not “peremptory” to define a date for elections in the country.
