María Corina Machado Won the Nobel. Where Does Venezuela’s Opposition Go From Here?

It was July 2024, and President Nicolás Maduro’s regime had barred Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s opposition, from boarding domestic flights and running in the upcoming presidential election. So she was crisscrossing the country by road to campaign for her chosen replacement, retired diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia. She traveled not with bodyguards but with ordinary Venezuelans—many of them motorcyclists who used to support the regime—to protect her.

As I followed Machado on the campaign trail, it was clear that the country had changed since my previous visits, when Venezuelans spoke about politics only in whispers—or not at all. Now, they turned out en masse to support Machado and her movement. Criticism of the regime suddenly seemed to be everywhere: on buses, in the street, even in front of armed security forces.

“A very powerful cultural and social rupture has already taken place—one that many people still haven’t understood,” Machado told me on the campaign.

More than a year later, support for Machado and her movement has not translated into political change in Venezuela. González likely won the July 2024 presidential election with about 67 percent of the vote, based on tally sheets collected from polling stations. Yet election authorities declared victory for Maduro, who has clung to power ever since by tightening repression against political opponents and dissenting voices. As for Machado, she now lives in hiding in Venezuela, where she faces death threats and criminal investigations from Maduro’s government.

On Oct. 10, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Machado for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela” and for “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has intensified its campaign against Maduro’s regime and threatened military action inside Venezuela.

Together, these moves have fueled hopes of regime change in the country. But for Machado and millions of Venezuelans, the fight for democracy remains far from finished. While elections and protests have not been enough to make Maduro relinquish power, the question now is whether rising international pressure could spur genuine—or even democratic—change on the ground.

An industrial engineer by training, Machado worked in her family’s steel company before turning to civic activism. In 1992, she founded a charity for homeless children in Caracas, and a decade later, she created Súmate, a civil society organization dedicated to promoting electoral transparency and democratic participation.

In 2010, Machado was elected to the National Assembly with more votes than any other lawmaker in the country’s history. Two years later, she founded the free-market conservative party Vente Venezuela, which she still leads. Her confrontational style quickly drew Chávez’s ire. In a heated 2012 exchange, he mocked her as “out of ranking” to debate with him, sneering that “an eagle does not hunt flies.”

That decade, Venezuela experienced a profound economic, political, and social unraveling. As oil prices plummeted and the country faced one of the largest economic collapses on record outside of war, Chávez and his successor, Maduro, concentrated power in the executive and ramped up repression, leading a United Nations fact-finding mission to accuse the latter’s government of crimes against humanity. The regime expelled Machado from office in 2014. In the years since, nearly 8 million Venezuelans—about a fourth of the population—have fled the country.

Once dismissed by some Venezuelans as a fringe right-wing politician, Machado emerged as a unifying figure in October 2023, when she won around 93 percent of the vote in the opposition’s primary. Previously, other opposition parties, such as Primero Justicia, were wary of Vente Venezuela’s confrontational approach to the regime and favored attempts at negotiating with Maduro. But after Machado’s landslide win in the primary, which followed years of failed incrementalism, the opposition ultimately lined up behind her.

In the presidential election, Machado—and, later, González—represented the Democratic Unitary Platform, a broad opposition coalition that ran on a platform to restore democratic institutions, end political repression, stabilize the economy, and reopen Venezuela to private investment and international financial support.

“There is no comparison between her and other opposition leaders,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. According to Berg, her leadership is “generational,” marked by a unique ability to connect across social classes and speak to the country’s deep longing for stability. “She is just a very smart, strategic, and courageous politician all wrapped in one,” he said.

During the 2024 campaign, Machado framed her struggle as spiritual. “This goes far beyond an electoral fight,” Machado said as she led an improvised prayer event in Caracas’s upscale Chacao neighborhood a week before the election. One of her greatest qualities is her ability to make everyone part of that fight, said Pedro Urruchurtu, Machado’s international coordinator who has worked with her for 14 years. Martínez, the president of Primero Justicia, echoed this sentiment—while she has not always agreed with Machado’s platform, she noted that unlike previous opposition leaders, Machado has managed to unify the opposition.

This unprecedented unity helped the opposition in the 2024 elections, when citizens mounted an unprecedented civic effort to safeguard and collect the precinct-level tally sheets that would show González’s overwhelming—but officially unrecognized—victory.

Since the election, Maduro’s regime has heightened its crackdown on the opposition. Many of Machado’s closest colleagues have been imprisoned or forced into exile. Last December, masked security forces abducted her Caracas coordinator, Jesús Armas, who remains imprisoned in El Helicoide, Venezuela’s most notorious torture center.

Meanwhile, Urruchurtu spent 14 months taking refuge inside the Argentine Embassy in Caracas. The compound provided Urruchurtu and other top aides a safe place to focus on the campaign work, but after the election, “the situation became unbearable,” Urruchurtu said. Government forces cut electricity and water to the building, sent armed forces to intimidate them, and restricted access to food and medical supplies. The team escaped to the United States through a U.S.-led covert operation in May.

Martínez now lives in exile in Colombia, after repeated threats against her and her family. Machado’s family, including her mother and three children, have also faced threats and intimidation and now live in exile. After leading an anti-government rally this January, Machado was briefly abducted by plainclothes officers. Since then, she has moved between safe houses. She is one of the few top opposition figures still inside Venezuela.

Machado greets supporters during a protest in Caracas on Jan. 9. Jesus Vargas via Getty Images

When Machado learned she had won the prize, she was quick to emphasize that it reflects the “achievement of a whole society.” This is a common refrain among Machado’s colleagues; Urruchurtu pointed out that “this was the struggle of an entire nation—one that had been asleep, thinking there wasn’t much it could do.”

To Machado’s team, the award is a lifeline. “It’s a very important moral boost,” Urruchurtu said. Berg believes that the Nobel puts the world’s attention on Venezuela “at least for a brief period,” and makes Machado “more untouchable” under Maduro’s regime.

James B. Story, the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela from 2018 to 2023, also said that the award has “already had an impact.” He believes it shows that the world has recognized that Maduro stole last year’s elections and “encourages those who frankly feel discouraged after 25 years of watching their country be torn apart.”

González, the opposition’s candidate in last year’s elections, told Foreign Policy in a written response, “This award brings visibility to our cause and reaffirms that the struggle for freedom can—and must—be carried out through peaceful means. It is both a moral and political boost for all of us who believe in a democratic transition and in national reconciliation.”

People protesting for democracy in Venezuela hold signs that read “justice” in Madrid on Jan. 9.Thomas COEX/AFP via Getty Images

Since early September, the Trump administration has carried out at least 19 strikes on mostly Venezuelan vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 75 people. As critics have questioned the legality of the attacks, Trump has also authorized CIA operations in Venezuela, announced that he will send the world’s largest aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, and deployed around 10,000 troops to the region.

In an August Pantera poll, around 70 percent of the 1,200 Venezuelans surveyed opposed Maduro’s regime, and 60 percent of those respondents favored U.S. backing for removing Maduro. Machado likewise supports U.S. military intervention in Venezuela—a position that her critics argue is undemocratic.

Machado’s stance toward foreign intervention has made her a controversial figure in the international community, alongside her alleged support for the failed 2002 coup attempt against Chávez. She “doesn’t have an unblemished record when it comes to democracy and freedom,” said Steven Levitsky, director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. This made the Nobel committee’s choice “more complicated than usual,” he added.

Machado’s colleagues, including Martínez and Urruchurtu, insist they have no control over Trump’s campaign. “Operations in the Caribbean are not ours. They belong to the U.S.,” Urruchurtu said. Still, he added, international support is needed to achieve democracy in Venezuela, and “the U.S. is our essential ally.”

González has also emphasized the importance of international collaboration. “Venezuela values the efforts of the international community to combat organized crime and drug trafficking, which have caused so much harm to the region. Joint work among nations is essential. The path toward democracy lies through cooperation, justice, and peace,” he told Foreign Policy.

Although the White House insists it is not pursuing “regime change,” Washington’s military threats and acknowledgment of covert action suggest that one of its principal aims in Venezuela is to remove Maduro from power. Story, for one, believes that it is “inevitable, but not imminent, that [Maduro] will be gone.” Yet he warned that this may not be enough to ensure democracy, noting that “the real tragedy is that all of Venezuela’s institutions are hijacked.”

Still, Levitsky sees the regime as “very weak, unpopular, and illegitimate.” And the prestige of the Nobel lends legitimacy to Machado’s fight—it could “make a difference for good in the world,” he said. “That’s worth supporting.”