Nobel Laureate Machado, Now Back in Venezuela, Faces Uphill Road to the Presidency

Days after she slipped back into Venezuela, María Corina Machado has the crowds, the candidacy and the Nobel Peace Prize. She doesn’t, however, have an election date or a chair at the negotiating table, and the White House has shown no sign it wants her in either place.On Thursday, Ms. Machado endorsed Washington’s roadmap anyway. The plan calls for replacing Venezuela’s high court and electoral council; declaring the presidency vacant; and holding a presidential vote next year. In a message to an Ibero-American Summit in Madrid, she called it a reasonable path back to constitutional order.Ending more than 10 months in self-imposed exile, Ms. Machado suddenly reappeared on October 25 inside the Santa Rosa church at Barquisimeto, in western Lara state, where worshippers wept and crowded around her.“I am here. With you,” she wrote on X that morning.People familiar with the details of her secretive return told reporters that the opposition figure had entered her home country by land from neighboring Colombia. Her motorcade spent roughly 11 hours traversing the more than 200 miles to Caracas as supporters lined highways and packed town squares.On October 29, shortly before Ms. Machado’s first news conference since coming home, the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, went on state television to promise elections. She did not say when.Ms. Machado, meanwhile, took the stage at Andrés Bello Catholic University and thanked President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the January raid that snatched the former dictator, Nicolás Maduro, from Caracas. “I have returned to finish a task and to fulfill a mandate,” she said in reference to her party’s apparent landslide victory in a 2024 presidential election in which Mr. Maduro claimed an improbable win.But as yet there is no date for a new election, no referee, and a dubious 2023 ruling by the Maduro government barring Ms. Machado from political office remains in effect. One longtime analyst of the region concedes that Venezuela’s electoral system needs an overhaul before there can be a free vote. Still, Ms. Machado’s presence on the ground makes the government’s slow timeline harder to defend.“There is no legitimate reason that that should take years,” a research professor of Latin American studies at the United States Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, Evan Ellis, tells The New York Sun. He accuses Ms. Rodríguez and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly, of slow-walking “negotiations about negotiations, just like the chavistas slow-rolled negotiations about democracy with Juan Gonzalez and others under the Biden administration.” Mr. Gonzalez ran in Ms. Machado’s stead after she was barred from the 2024 presidential ballot.Seven Tries, One Border CrossingThe homecoming ended nearly two years in hiding and exile. Ms. Machado went underground after being briefly detained at a Caracas protest in January 2025. Last December, she left the country in secret to collect her Nobel Prize at Oslo. A month later, American forces seized Mr. Maduro, who now awaits a narco-terrorism trial in New York set for June 2027.But rather than hand power to the opposition, as many had expected, Mr. Trump threw his support behind Ms. Rodríguez, Mr. Maduro’s vice president.“I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader,” he said of Ms. Machado in January. Less than two weeks later, Ms. Machado gave him her Nobel medal at the White House.Winning the Nobel turned out to be the easy part. Between June and September, by her party’s tally, Ms. Machado was blocked seven times from re-entering the country, including three times in a single 24-hour stretch.One of those bids followed the twin earthquakes in June that left more than 6,500 Venezuelans dead, according to the government’s final count, and it drew a charge of political opportunism from Trump administration officials. Caracas, for its part, still lists her as a fugitive.A Transition Negotiated Without HerThe talks that will decide Venezuela’s future have run since August without her. Ms. Rodríguez’s brother Jorge, the National Assembly president, leads the government side. Dinorah Figuera, a Machado rival who headed the 2015 legislature, leads an opposition delegation chosen by Washington. A fourth round of talks is scheduled for November 11 to 15.Ms. Rodríguez was meant to serve 90 days. Ten months later, the roadmap calls for a new Supreme Tribunal of Justice to be appointed by year’s end and a new electoral council soon after. A declared presidential vacancy would then start a six-month clock to a vote.A 23-member nominations committee sworn in on October 22 is taking applications for all 32 seats on the court through November 11. Officials put the earliest realistic date for an election in June 2027 and concede it could slip to 2028. On Thursday, Mr. Rubio said a vote would ideally come next year but would not promise one before Mr. Trump leaves office.Mr. Ellis says the Trump administration picked Ms. Rodríguez to govern after the raid that seized Mr. Maduro, “to avoid disintegration of the country.” It feared the democratic opposition “did not have the connections with military authorities and associated organizations to take control of the country.” Oil has since raised the cost of changing course.A handover to Ms. Machado now “could lead to questioning of the legal framework upon which oil companies, reassured by US administration protection, are returning to the country,” he tells the Sun.In August, the White House announced a deal giving the Pentagon a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, the company at the center of the agreement on Venezuelan crude. On the day Ms. Machado crossed the border, Mr. Trump was asked about her and said he knew nothing about her return. “I think she’s a very nice woman,” he said. “But we’re doing really well in Venezuela.”Ms. Rodríguez has leaned on her relationship with Washington. In her October 29 address, she cited 61 signed oil and gas contracts while pledging that “there will be elections, all those mandated by our constitution, organized by a renewed electoral authority and with the world as witness.” Days later, she put the tally of contracts at 80.None of that is guaranteed to last, and Mr. Ellis sees trouble coming from Washington. Democrats will run both chambers of Congress in January after Tuesday’s midterm sweep. The legal footing of the Blue Energy deal is open to challenge. Oil companies may start to worry that Trump administration guarantees “may no longer be ironclad.”Taken together, he argues, those pressures “could create a post-January economic and political crisis in Venezuela,” and that could give Ms. Machado an opening she lacks today.A Ban Still on the BooksEven if the roadmap holds, Ms. Machado cannot appear on a ballot until the disqualification imposed under Mr. Maduro is lifted. That comes last, after a rebuilt high court, a new electoral council and legal recognition for opposition parties, including her own Vente Venezuela. The Interior Ministry is still in the hands of Diosdado Cabello, who warned earlier this year that a “surprise” awaited Ms. Machado if she came back.At Andrés Bello Catholic University, Ms. Machado said hundreds of political prisoners are still behind bars and vowed not to leave the country again. “The date of the election is the date of liberation,” she said.If that date comes, the count itself will be the test.“Very close vote counting, done manually, including at the tallying and integration sites, will be vital to ensure that the Chavistas don’t just falsely declare that they won when they lost, as happened in 2024,” Mr. Ellis says.Whether Ms. Rodríguez lets it get that far is another question.“Delcy can’t be trusted to hold any elections any more than Lucy would hold the football for Charlie Brown to kick it in the Peanuts cartoons,” Mr. Ellis says. “But at least Lucy wasn’t evil.”

Nobel Laureate Machado, Now Back in Venezuela, Faces Uphill Road to the Presidency

Nobel Laureate Machado, Now Back in Venezuela, Faces Uphill Road to the Presidency

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