Today former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is expected to receive his first day in a New York court after being seized in Caracas by U.S. special operations forces on Jan. 3 and sent to a Brooklyn prison with his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple face U.S. charges of “narco-terrorism,” among others.
Meanwhile, though, the discussion of what comes next in Venezuela risks heading off in vague, undemocratic directions. Venezuela watchers have become consumed by which of the country’s two women leaders—former vice president and now interim President Delcy Rodríguez and Nobel Peace Prize laureate and head of the democratic opposition María Corina Machado—is in favor with U.S. President Donald Trump. This topic is a red herring.
The real matter is building a democratic transition after more than 20 years of institutional decay and polarization. The reforms required to achieve the conditions for democratic elections may take time, and they will almost certainly take longer than the less-than-a-year proposed by Machado.
But though the timing is in doubt, the first step is clear: a focused discussion, especially between the Trump and Rodríguez administrations, on the institutions, legal reforms, technology, and political commitments that need to be in place for a transition. Rather than fixate on the table stakes of which leader is up or down with Trump, public debate needs to shift to creating the specific conditions for meaningful elections and the benchmarks to that end demonstrating forward progress.
Trump administration officials have so far avoided engaging on substantive issues. The two U.S. cabinet secretaries who have visited Venezuela—Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum—said little about when elections might be held. Wright mentioned 18 to 24 months as a reasonable timeline, while others have cited 2030 as a target date for free and fair elections.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, has spoken only of three stages—stabilization, economic recovery and reconciliation, and transition—though what these stages entail and how long they are expected to last the secretary has left unspecified. Trump has occasionally mentioned elections. Still, in a meeting on March 6 with Machado, Trump and his team urged her to be patient and to avoid rushing to return to Venezuela to avoid potential problems.
And that’s part of the problem. Given Trump’s early declaration of success of his Venezuela mission, the White House is reluctant to rock the boat in any way that could undermine his narrative that all is well and good in Venezuela and that Rodríguez is a reliable, honest partner.
For her part, the interim president avoids discussion of an electoral timetable, though given the number of posters festooning Caracas streets and her public appearances it seems that Rodríguez is engaging in a political campaign from the presidential palace. It’s not unreasonable to expect that she will try to delay any electoral calendar until she feels the economy has improved sufficiently to allow her to win a delayed presidential contest.
That economic recovery still looks a ways off. While a new law promises to increase investment in the country’s all-important hydrocarbons industry, and the auctioning of dollars from oil exports in the local market has brought greater liquidity to the economy, annual inflation was running at 600 percent in February this year. It will also take years before investment can turn around Venezuela’s collapse in gas and oil production.
Given this state of affairs, it’s little wonder that according to a recent survey conducted by Gold Glove Consulting, Machado remains the most popular political figure in the country, with 67 percent of respondents saying they would vote for her, compared to 25 percent for Rodríguez. The same survey found that 68 percent of the population would prefer to see elections within a year.
When and under what conditions elections can be held depends, in large part, on the Trump administration. More than 20 years of Chavismo—first under former President Hugo Chávez, the movement’s namesake, and then under his handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro—gutted and politicized Venezuela’s electoral machinery.
Consequently, the Chavista legacy of laws and institutions will all need to be reformed, removed, or eliminated. A starting point is replacing the National Electoral Council (CNE, its initials in Spanish). Packed with government partisans, the CNE certified the reelection of Maduro in July 28, 2024, over the opposition candidate, Edmundo González. International election observers and statisticians that later studied the ballots collected by a nationwide movement of civil society groups and the opposition confirmed that González had won more than 67 percent of the vote to Maduro’s 30 percent.
The same government (minus the now-jailed Maduro) and National Assembly that appointed and confirmed that CNE remain in power. Any effort to quickly recreate a credible, objective, and balanced CNE will require some form of multipartisan, independent body that could both appoint and confirm a new CNE panel.
Presumably, that process of creating an ad hoc committee and naming replacements could be achieved relatively quickly, provided there is a political agreement to create and name such a committee. That could happen relatively quickly if there was pressure from the United States.
The White House and the newly reopened U.S. Embassy in Venezuela can prod things along by calling for the creation of such a body, alongside frequent visits by cabinet secretaries and calls for investment in the country’s economy. Encouraging investment is important not just to ensure that political change takes place but also because the sort of long-term, broad investment in hydrocarbons and beyond required for economic development can only flourish under a democratically elected government.
Once established, a balanced and independent CNE would need to set out to vet and, if necessary, restaff the CNE bureaucracy at both regional and national levels. The CNE, after all, oversees not just election preparation and process management but also, crucially, tabulation and the handling of the printed voter receipts.
There are also technical issues to deal with. With the exodus of close to 8 million Venezuelans since 2014, the new, improved CNE will need to update the voter registry. This has been updated only haphazardly since 2024. And if it is determined that the vast diaspora needs to be included in the voting process—and it should—registration will need to be extended to those roughly 20 percent of Venezuelans who have fled the political repression and economic chaos created by Chavismo.
An audit of Venezuela’s electronic voting system and the software would also need to be conducted to ensure confidence and transparency in how votes are counted and transmitted from local voting centers to the national headquarters. The opposition has long railed against the integrity of the software. (At one point, Machado curiously claimed that the software company contracted by the former government rigged the 2020 U.S. elections.) Still, a transparent audit will take less time than the wholesale creation of a new voting system proposed by some members of the opposition.
Additionally, establishing an environment in which voters, parties, and candidates feel free to campaign, gather, and express diverse opinions will require the repeal of a laundry list of laws that have accumulated in the past 20 years. Those laws were intended to stifle dissent, pluralism, and expression and granted the state broad powers to arrest and prosecute opponents. They include a dangerously vague law against delinquency and terrorism, a law criminalizing “hatred,” a law with a euphemistic title about the social responsibility of the media, and regulations restricting the financing and operation of nongovernmental organizations.
Many of those could be lifted with a mere vote of the government-controlled National Assembly, should there be political will, but given the governing party’s majority, such a reform is unlikely to originate in the national legislature. Instead, it will take private and public pressure from the White House and other foreign governments, such as Spain and the United Kingdom, to repeal those laws. It was such pressure that led the assembly to approve its (imperfect and restrictive) amnesty law this year offering a release for political prisoners.
There is also the traditional role, predating Chavismo, of the military in overseeing elections. With the 1998 election of Chávez came a reorganization and politicization of the once-independent, professional armed forces. While a complete reform of the security services may take longer than Venezuelan voters would like, there will need to be a comprehensive agreement on how to ensure that Venezuela’s pro-government security forces cannot put their collective thumbs on the scale by intimidating voters and interfering in the electoral process.
Lastly, there is the issue of ensuring an institutional capacity to monitor both key pre-electoral conditions (such as campaign finance and the use of public funds to buy or coerce voters) and to independently adjudicate post-election disputes. An independent CNE could potentially guide that process. But broader assurances over disputes and their fallout will require at least a minimal capacity in Venezuela’s electoral tribunal and the supreme court, both of which are packed with pro-government appointments.
A complete overhaul of Venezuela’s judicial system may not be necessary if the intent is to stage credible elections for the executive. Consensual multipartisan commitments for resolving disputes that may arise could be sufficient, especially if the first step in Rubio’s three-stage transition is to first hold presidential elections.
For later elections, including the renewal of the National Assembly and regional and local authorities, such an overhaul will be essential. The dates for those contests should also be set in any future agreement to avoid the potential paralysis of a democratically elected executive and a compliant, partisan, Chavista legislative and local government apparatus.
The time to start the process toward free and fair elections is now, and Venezuela needs the Trump White House to help make them happen.
