Venezuela opposition leader María Machado calls for elections upon return
Machado, who was in exile for nearly a year, said the transition in Venezuela's government would be "irreversible, organised, pacific".
Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado has urged that elections be held next year.
At a news conference in Caracas on Wednesday, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said Venezuela’s shift toward democracy was "irreversible".
She also thanked the Trump administration for opening the "floodgate to freedom" by capturing her rival, former President Nicolás Maduro.
That same day, Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, said elections would take place and that her government should oversee a "transition of this magnitude" — a view Machado dismissed as illogical. Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice-president, did not announce a voting date.
Machado said there would be elections in 2027, but she also did not give a precise timetable.
The transition in Venezuela would be "irreversible, organised, pacific", Machado said, standing in front of a slogan that read "Let Us Be Free".
Her return to the country follows repeated earlier attempts to go back to Venezuela that failed.
Last year, Machado left Venezuela on a speedboat in the dark to travel to Norway and receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Soon after, in January, the US seized Maduro.
The Trump administration then supported Rodríguez as leader. She was sworn in as interim president and later signed an oil deal that gave favourable terms to the US.
While it is still unclear what Machado intends to do next, she has previously said she would run for president again if an election were held. Her return to the country depended on approval from the Trump administration.
Speaking about her return, Machado said she had heard one word repeated by the thousands of supporters who lined her route into the capital — freedom.
"I come to carry out a task and complete a mandate," she said.
The opposition leader said she had not received a message or invitation to meet from Rodríguez, and would not personally take part in election negotiations between opposition representatives and the government.
But she wished them well in their work, she said, so that the electoral body could be reformed and every Venezuelan, inside the country and abroad, could vote.
Shortly before Machado’s news conference, Rodríguez gave a conciliatory speech, saying she had "instructed the security agencies that no one be detained without judicial order, except in cases of flagrant commission of crimes".
Rodríguez also spoke of "the doors being open" in Venezuela to returning exiles and discussed dialogue and building consensus.