Anti-socialist Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado confirmed Tuesday that she intends to run for president in the event a free and fair election takes place in the South American country.
Venezuela is currently going through a new chapter in its decades-old political crisis since President Donald Trump authorized a U.S. law enforcement operation in Caracas on January 3 that led to the arrest of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, both of whom are presently undergoing trial proceedings in a New York court on multiple drug trafficking charges.
Delcy Rodríguez is currently serving as “acting president” of Venezuela after she was sworn in following the Maduro arrest. Rodríguez, a lifelong Marxist, was previously serving as Maduro’s vice president and oil minister. Over the past months, she has collaborated with the Trump administration as U.S. officials move forward with President Trump’s three-phase plan — stabilization, recovery, and transition — for restoring democracy in Venezuela. While the United States did not recognize Maduro as the legitimate ruler of Venezuela since he clung to power through sham elections from 2018 onwards, it has recognized Rodríguez as the nation’s head of state and lifted U.S. sanctions imposed on her.
At press time, there is no set date for when free and fair elections will take place in Venezuela. Over the past weeks, Machado – who leads Venezuela’s only mainstream center-right party, Vente Venezuela – has issued calls, alongside her party, for new elections to take place in Venezuela in light of Maduro’s absence from power. On Tuesday, Machado spoke with Piers Morgan and said she intends to run for president once free elections are set to take place.
Machado recounted that the Venezuelan opposition defeated Maduro in a landslide during in the 2024 presidential election despite the extremely unfair conditions imposed by the Maduro regime and without the Venezuelan diaspora that fled from socialism — roughly a third of the nation’s entire population — being able to vote. In July 2024, Maduro staged a sham election in which he banned all opposition except for elderly former diplomat Edmundo González, who ran as a placeholder candidate for Machado after the Venezuelan socialist regime banned her from running. Machado had been overwhelmingly elected as the Venezuelan opposition’s candidate in a 2023 primary process.
Maduro never showed a single piece of documentation or evidence that could corroborate his claimed “victory” in the 2024 sham election. Machado, in contrast, organized thousands of small Venezuelan teams spread across the country that were able to successfully secure enough vote tallies to demonstrate that González defeated Maduro. The tallies have been in the custody of Panama’s National Bank since 2025, and digital copies were published on a website.
After the 2024 election, Machado went into hiding at an undisclosed location in Venezuela, facing threats of arrest on spurious “treason” and “conspiracy” charges, while González went into exile to Spain in September 2024. The Nobel Committee awarded Machado the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts during the 2024 election, which she dedicated to President Trump. Machado successfully escaped from Venezuela and arrived in Norway to receive the award with the help of the Trump administration.
“Now we’re gonna have a free and fair electoral process with international observants, and that will mean that not only it’s gonna be that 70 percent, it’s gonna be much higher,” Machado told Morgan. “Certainly, I would offer myself, and I hope many others so that the Venezuelan people can choose freely what we want.”
“These social tensions, because of the economic super-hard conditions that are growing, and the fear because of the regime still in power, can only be channeled peacefully, civically, if we have an electoral process,” she asserted during the interview.
Referring to President Trump’s three-phase plan, outlined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Machado reiterated to Morgan that the plan calls for stabilizing the country and dismantling the Venezuelan socialist regime’s repressive structures and corruption “mechanisms” and said, “When everything comes out, when the truth is learned, we’ll see that Venezuela has been the largest stolen process of stealing the resources of a nation, bringing a nation to ruins.”
“This is huge. So putting controls on the regime is a good step. And Delcy Rodríguez is following instructions to start dismantling this repressive structure,” Machado said. “But the third stage, it’s clear, and you mentioned it. It’s an electoral process that will bring our society back together to legitimize our institutions.”
Although there is still no set date for prospective free and fair elections in Venezuela, local and international outlets have pointed out in recent days that Delcy Rodríguez appears to be in a “pre-electoral campaign” phase by holding rallies in Venezuela using light blue clothing — a color widely used and often associated with Machado’s Vente Venezuela party — in favor of the shades of red long utilized by the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Experts told the outlet Efecto Cocuyo that Rodríguez appears to be attempting to project her own image away from the red-shaded socialist imagery.
A prospective election between Rodríguez and Machado would see the “acting president” face a landslide defeat, according to the latest survey conducted by the Venezuelan polling firm Meganálisis. Only 4.95 percent of respondents expressed their intention to vote for Rodríguez against an overwhelming 84.36 percent majority who would vote for Machado. The study also found that nine out of ten Venezuelans reject Rodríguez’s permanence as interim president of Venezuela.
Meganálisis’ president, Rubén Chirino Leañez, told Breitbart News in January that Machado has remained consistently popular in Venezuela due to her decades-long staunch opposition to the socialist regime and refusal to negotiate with regime officials, unlike other “opposition” politicians.
Maduro’s arrest, and the circumstances in which he clung to power through sham elections for over a decade, have led to an unprecedented moment in Venezuela. While Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution states the terms in which the “absolute absence” of a president can be declared — such as death, impeachment, or abandonment of the position — and the conditions that would warrant new snap elections in such scenarios, the Venezuelan Supreme Court, controlled in its entirety by the nation’s socialist regime, declared Maduro’s absence as a “forced” one and not an “absolute” one, alleging that Maduro had been “kidnapped” on January 3. As such, the court ordered Rodríguez be appointed as interim president.
The Venezuelan regime invoked Article 233 in March 2013 following late dictator Hugo Chávez’s death to call for snap elections a month later, a highly questioned electoral event that Maduro narrowly “won.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.