A senior State Department official told reporters on Monday that the U.S. government expects the two sides negotiating the reconstruction of the government of Venezuela to have established a new, legitimate Supreme Court before the end of 2026 and a new National Electoral Council (CNE) by early 2027, paving the way for elections.
The official was speaking in the context of global demands from Venezuelans for an end to the 27-year-old chavista socialist dictatorship, currently in power as an “interim” authority after the arrest of longtime dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. Under “interim president” Delcy Rodríguez — once one of Maduro’s most enthusiastic henchwomen — the chavistas remain in control of government institutions but have allowed for the safe expression of political opposition in the streets of the nation’s greatest cities.
A major protest demanding a date for presidential elections, and complaining that the establishment of an election protocol was taking too long, took place on Friday with no major incidents of violence — a stark contrast to the Maduro years, when Venezuelan socialist authorities would wantonly kill protesters in the streets.
The momentum of the anti-socialist movement accelerated on Sunday, when the country’s most beloved opposition leader, former lawmaker and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, returned to the country, meeting throngs of people on the streets while leading a caravan through multiple states. Machado was banned from running in the 2024 sham election Maduro claimed to “win” and is widely considered the likeliest winner of a free and fair election in the country.
The senior State Department official explained in remarks to the press on Monday that the position of the United States is that any accelerated attempt at holding an election was doomed to failure because the institutions undergirding the Venezuelan government are overrun by untrustworthy socialists. The Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) and the CNE are the institutions most urgently in need of rehabilitation as they could easily annul election results deemed detrimental to the socialists, ban popular candidates from running, or otherwise skew election results.
“You cannot have a free and fair election that is accepted by both sides, all sides, in a country as long as that infrastructure is in place,” the official explained, “so that infrastructure needs to be replaced, it needs to be ripped out and replaced with something new.”
“If you don’t have a new TSJ and a we don’t have a new CNE, we cannot have a credible election because the loser of that election is going to claim that the other side cheated,” the official continued, “or we can’t have a credible election because the existing infrastructure that controls those two things will prevent a credible election from happening, so you have to create the architecture for a credible election before you have one.”
The United States is facilitating negotiations between the chavistas, led in the talks by Delcy Rodríguez’s brother Jorge, and the opposition, represented by the head of the 2015 National Assembly, Dinorah Figuera. That National Assembly class is considered the final group of political leaders in the country elected in a truly free and fair election. Speaking to Breitbart News last week, Figuera laid out a roadmap to elections that echoed the State Department’s position: first, the reconstruction of critical government institutions, then free and fair elections.
“We have to appoint a National Electoral Council that is credible, trustworthy, transparent, that people have in that sense the guarantee that their vote will be respected,” Figuera explained.
In the press call on Monday, the State Department official laid out a timeline for the rehabilitation of the Venezuelan state apparatus.
“It is the goal of this endeavor [the negotiations] before the end of the calendar year, meaning by mid-December, to have a new TSJ in place,” the official said. “Here’s how it will work: the committee comes up with the 32 names, the 32 names are submitted to the National Assembly. Jorge Rodríguez has to get these names passed.”
Shortly thereafter, the official continued, the CNE would be reformed. The new electoral body, the official explained, “will no longer be in a position to remove candidates from the ballot… they’re the people that put out the machines, open the polling places, count the votes, and report the results.”
Sometime thereafter, the official explained, “Delcy will have to declare a vacancy in the presidency… once you declare a permanent vacancy, that triggers under their existing constitution a six-month period for new elections.” As it will be the task of the CNE to set a date for the election, and that body does not exist in its updated form yet, the official could not offer a concrete date for a new Venezuelan presidential election.
The official also defended establishing a process that allowed the Rodríguez siblings and the regime generally to have a say in the elections, arguing that the alternative could be a civil war.
“Almost every democratic transition has required you to work with some of the actual authorities of the country in order to get it,” the official explained. “That doesn’t meant you want to leave the current authorities in place forever, it just recognizes that in order for a transition to be peaceful, you need buy-in and the cooperation of the other side of the equation, especially the people who control the security services.”
America’s role, the official emphasized, is to “use our leverage as a government over the interim authorities to ensure that this process keeps moving forward in a responsible way.”