Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has promised elections as part of a transition to “full democracy”, but gave no timetable in an address that left the opposition pressing for clearer commitments.
Speaking at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, 23 September 2026, Rodríguez said “there will be elections in Venezuela”. She said Venezuelans would decide “the right moment” to hold them. No date, including a tentative one, has been announced.
Rodríguez became interim president after Nicolás Maduro was seized by US forces in January and taken to New York to face drug-trafficking charges. She was sworn in just days after his capture.
The question of an election timetable has become central to the interim administration’s attempt to establish its authority. Venezuela’s constitution mandates a vote in 2030, while the opposition has sought an election in 2027. Rodríguez’s government has not committed to that earlier timetable.
Rodríguez said her administration had started talks with sectors of the opposition and would guarantee the participation of all political forces. She also said national institutions were being prepared for elections. The government has not explained how Venezuelans would determine the timing of a vote, how it would define “full democracy”, or what conditions would govern equal participation.
Opposition figures in Venezuela have criticised Rodríguez for declining to set even a tentative date. Their concerns are sharpened by the absence of María Corina Machado, the country’s most prominent opposition leader, from the talks between the interim government and opposition sectors.
Machado remains barred from standing for office under a ban imposed during the Maduro government. She left Venezuela in December to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. One of her advisers said she had tried three times to return to Venezuela this week, and that each attempt had been blocked.
The dispute over access to political competition follows the 2024 election in which Maduro was declared president and Rodríguez vice-president. Critics have denounced that election as fraudulent.
The upheaval that followed has also shaped the transition. A US raid on Caracas less than nine months before Rodríguez’s UN speech led to Maduro’s capture and killed about 100 people.
US officials have signalled that they see institutional reform as a condition for any credible vote. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said a “political transition process” would have to take place first to rebuild the institutions needed for free and fair elections.
Trump told the LA Times earlier this month that he did not think Venezuela was ready for elections yet. That position leaves the interim government under pressure from an opposition seeking a 2027 ballot, while the US administration argues that the conditions for an election must first be built.
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