Maria Corina Machado, Nobel Peace Prize winner from Venezuela, said Saturday that she wants to run in Venezuelan elections as a candidate, and that she is working on making those elections exemplary.
“It will be a process of coming together for the entire nation,” she said.
“I will be a candidate, but there may be others, of course. I would love to compete with everyone, with anyone who wants to be a candidate, of course.”
Machado was barred from running in Venezuela’s 2024 election and her Vente Venezuela party remains banned. She was replaced by opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, whom she backed in the election. Much of the international community recognize González as the rightful winner of that election.
U.S. President Donald Trump hasn’t indicated when Venezuela will have its next election. On May 12, Trump posted on Truth Social a meme of Venezuela draped in a U.S. flag with the headline, “51st State.”
Machado said in March that she planned to return to Venezuela as the country continues its political transition following the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
Machado, a longtime critic of Venezuela’s socialist regime, said in a March video posted to X that she hopes to help prepare for what she called “a new and resounding electoral victory” and work toward an “orderly and sustainable transition to democracy.”
Machado rose to prominence as one of the leading figures in Venezuela’s opposition movement during the regimes of former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and Maduro.
She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 for her efforts promoting democracy in Venezuela and has been living outside the country since traveling to Oslo, Norway, to receive the award. She later met with Trump at the White House and praised him for helping bring Maduro “before international justice” after the former Venezuelan leader was captured by U.S. forces in January.
Machado met with Trump at the White House on Jan. 15 and presented him with her Nobel Peace Prize medal.
She said the gesture was meant to symbolize the historic relationship between the United States and Venezuela’s independence movement. Trump called it a “wonderful gesture” in a Truth Social post.
Venezuela is currently being run by interim leader Delcy Rodríguez, who remains in office in Caracas.
After Maduro’s capture, Trump called Venezuela “a dead country” and said the United States would have to bring it back.
In April, the U.S. Department of Treasury removed Rodriguez from its sanctions blacklist. People on that list have their assets blocked, and people from the United States are mostly prohibited from dealing with them.