what’s at stake
President Donald Trump met with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado as a debate raged in Washington over how quickly to move to new elections in Venezuela.
Republican allies of the president are among those calling for swift elections, seeing interim President Delcy Rodríguez as simply a continuation of now-removed President Nicolás Maduro’s regime.
But others caution that it will take time to rebuild democracy in Venezuela, and that quick elections are not necessarily a solution. Meanwhile, Trump himself seems to have no problem with Rodríguez remaining in power as the US looks to reap the benefits of Venezuela’s oil; he called her a “terrific person” on Wednesday after the two spoke by phone.
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who’s making the case
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said elections should have been held in Venezuela “yesterday” — but he didn’t fault the Trump administration for taking its time:
“Yesterday would have been a good day [to hold elections]. I think we have to understand we have a process, and that’s what the Trump administration is trying to do.
“[Rodríguez is] clearly not an elected leader. She’s the head of the cartels. She was part of Maduro’s stolen last election… I think the Trump administration does have a plan for democracy, and María Corina Machado will be the president.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., argued elections should be held “right away” and that the US should not be controlling Venezuela:
“I would want to see elections right away for the people of Venezuela. They deserve democracy. There have been elections that have been disappeared by this dictatorship, but the sooner we have it, the better, so that we can be healing the country and not have the colonial relationship that it seems like this president is trying to set up.”
Francisco Rodríguez, senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued that pressuring Venezuela to have elections soon would backfire:
“The objective of democratic forces and the international community in Venezuela should be to achieve a durable democratic transition. Trying to pressure the regime into holding a presidential election soon won’t get us closer to that objective; rather, it risks repeating the same mistakes that led to the 2024 electoral fiasco.
“Elections tend to come at the end of negotiated political transitions, not at the beginning. Transitions require complex negotiations about guarantees and restraints on executive power. Venezuela’s constitution is not that of a democracy, but that of an electoral autocracy where power is concentrated to an inordinate degree in the executive branch. Deep institutional reforms — including changes to the Constitution — need to be implemented to embody credible guarantees that the losers of elections will not be persecuted.
“A much more viable strategy is one in which the regime is incentivized to make meaningful democratic reforms in the context of political negotiations leading to a power-sharing agreement and a negotiated transition to electoral democracy.”
Notable
- The Trump administration’s first sale of Venezuelan oil is valued at $500 million, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Eleanor Mueller scooped, and some of the revenue is being held in Qatar.