What Next For The Venezuelan Opposition

Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio looks at the current state of the Venezuelan opposition, and what lies ahead.

Transcript

What Next for the Venezuelan Opposition? What next, indeed. The obvious answer at the moment is: not much. But there are a few things to note here. 

The first thing is that we should define what we mean by the Venezuelan opposition, because everyone knows about Maria Corina Machado, the utterly ubiquitous figure who continues to be a fixture on US cable media, but it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t her who had run in the elections of summer 2024. She had been barred by the Maduro administration and so the opposition - nominally at least - was headed by Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, a career diplomat turned politician, who was really nothing more than a willing vehicle to stand against Maduro. But stand he did, and - it’s widely agreed - he won, by a significant margin. Urrutia was subsequently threatened by the Chavista regime, had family members arrested, and fled to exile in Spain, where he is now, where he is surprisingly quiet. Even as simply a figurehead for the opposition, there would have been traction in his taking of the stage after the US action to remove Maduro, given the perceived legitimacy of his election victory. Because whilst Maria Corina Machado is the most highly public present figure, she doesn’t have an official position, let alone an elected position. So we’re left assuming that either Edmundo Gonzalez is no longer interested, or that his relative absence is a media strategy to give Machado primacy. What it does also mean is that the Venezuelan opposition know - or rather it’s been made clear to them by the Trump administration - that the elections of summer 2024 in the country are no longer up for debate. 

Maria Corina Machado has started to say as much, and she has little choice, given that she is trapped in the orbit of Donald Trump. Her only power is what he conveys to her. She can hardly step outside of that orbit as it would make her irrelevant, at least in the corridors of power in Washington, which is all that matters at the moment until such time as some future elections are held in Venezuela, which technically should be sooner rather than later given Maduro’s absence, but which in all likelihood will be pushed back to 2030 as Delcy Rodriguez makes a political move - supported by her brother and head of Venezuelan congress Jorge Rodriguez - to complete the term. A move which is facing no pushback whatsoever from the United States, of course. 

On the 3rd January, soon after the removal of Maduro, Machado released a statement saying that “the hour has arrived for popular sovereignty and national sovereignty to rule in our country.” She continued by saying that the Venezuelan opposition was “ready to make (their) mandate count, and to take power.” How naive that statement seems now, how misguided.

So Machado is left on the fringes, but has the challenge of staying relevant, which - for the moment at least - is a relevance which can only be conveyed through an ongoing presence across the US media. The presenting of the Nobel Peace Prize medal was a move in vain, and really the only other significant play that the Venezuelan opposition has at the moment is to continue to talk about political prisoners in Venezuela, and push for their release, which has been happening, but at a trickle. 

There is another possibility, though, which would prove to be a problem for Delcy Rodriguez, Maria Corina Machado and Donald Trump, which would involve the beginnings of demonstrations and civil resistance in Venezuela itself - the emerging of a new opposition, in other words. It would be a problem for everyone involved because the overt repression that the Maduro regime is used to employing is now no longer possible for them, as it would be a terrible look for the US, so it’s a tool no longer in their kit, at least as regards mass detentions and imprisonment goes. Equally the emergence of a new opposition would see the movement evolve and sideline Machado, and it would generate difficulty for Trump because the last thing that the White House wants to see in Venezuela are complexities around a democratic transition which would complicate their central interest in the country: extractivism. 

For the moment, though, and to all extents and purposes, the events of 3rd Jan have sidelined the Venezuelan opposition, arguably to a position of even greater marginalisation than where they were before.