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CARACAS—Relevance. In a word, that is the goal of Venezuela’s opposition more than two months after the capture of Nicolás Maduro, a period that has seen acting President Delcy Rodríguez surprisingly consolidate herself as the country’s new leader with the support of Donald Trump.
As a result, the opposition is debating tactics and strategies to regain the upper hand – to recover momentum for democratic elections and ensure that the opposition’s leaders are not marginalized or forgotten by either the Venezuelan public or the international community.
“The danger, now already a reality, is the opposition’s irrelevance in the unfolding of events in Venezuela,” Andrés Caleca, who served as president of the National Electoral Council (CNE) in 1999, told AQ.
Key upcoming decisions include the timing of the return to Venezuela of María Corina Machado, the political leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate; how forcefully and publicly to press Trump, and the international community more broadly, to schedule new elections; and how to ensure the release of the more than 500 Venezuelans still in prison for political reasons.
