Maria Corina Machado and the Battle to Democratic Backsliding in Venezuela
- bilsociety20
- 13 nov
- Tempo di lettura: 5 min
The democratic backsliding in Venezuela is a demonstrative example of a tendency which is characterizing many legal systems around the world during the twenty-first-century: the shift toward authoritarianism. Venezuelan citizens have been witnessing the collapse of democratic institutions, manipulation of elections and repression of the opposition. Despite such difficulties, Venezuelan democratic leader Machado, supported by numerous civic actors, has never stopped deploying efforts in the resistance. In this article, I’m going to investigate where the roots of democratic backsliding reside, starting from the inspirational example of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
A nobel for democracy
“The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 goes to a brave and committed champion of peace – to a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness”. These were the words used to describe Maria Corina Machado, leader and founder of the Venezuelan democratic movement “Súmate”, on October 10th in Oslo. Machado has dedicated significant efforts to the unification of a once deeply divided opposition, relying on the common willingness to defend the principles of popular rule. Over more than 20 years, she stood up for judicial independence, human rights, free elections and popular representation to the hilt, with the ultimate aim to restore freedom of the Venezuelan people.
Authoritarian Erosion in Venezuela
The Venezuelan political landscape has been tempestuous over the years, shifting from one of the most established and prosperous democracies in Latin America, in the 90s, to an entrenched authoritarianism during the government of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro; which brought the country to a humanitarian and economic crisis characterized by high levels of poverty among the population. The decline began in 1999, when Chavez started to draft a new constitution without the approval of the National Congress. The democratic opposition responded with coups, boycotts and strikes, but tactics of such nature could end up being a double-edged sword when directed against a democratically elected president. After the death of Chavez, in 2013, Venezuela had become a Hybrid regime, in which the economy was collapsing, institutions were getting weaker and weaker and the military and judiciary were highly politicized. The power was overtaken by Nicolas Maduro, who progressively ensured dominance hiding behind a façade of democracy. Javier Corrales, a Venezuelan political scientist at Amherst College (Massachusetts, USA), described this period under the theory of “legislative dodging”, explaining how leaders in hybrid and authoritarian regimes “sidestep legislatures instead of shutting them down”. The Venezuelan presidents undertook several strategies to gradually exclude the democratic opposition from the government: they ruled by decree under recurring Ley Habilitante provisions, established parallel institutions and constituent bodies that could override the legitimate ones, struck down parliamentary initiatives through court-stacking and manipulated electoral rules. This illustrates the paradox of what Corrales calls “autocratic legalism”, meaning the strategic use of democratic tools to reach anti-democratic outcomes. The outlined events established a hostile territory for political work in current times, especially for the opposition that struggles to exist and operate independently. In such a fragile political landscape, president Maduro suppressed the winning opposition during 2015’s elections and shut down independent media and foreign journalism.
Civic Mobilisation and Electoral Integrity
The latest highlight on this situation comes from the elections of 2024, which saw Ms Machado as the opposition’s presidential candidate, before her candidacy was blocked by Maduro’s regime. She then endorsed Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, the representative of a different party which gained strong popular consensus and became leader for the opposition coalition. Venezuelan citizens organized in mass to volunteer as elections monitors, receiving specialized training to ensure transparency. Harassment, arrest and torture were the punishments reserved to these citizens but they firmly stood on their objectives and recorded the local vote tallies before government agents could alter or destroy them, subsequently proving the opposition’s landslide victory. Maduro invalidated the evidence yet the opposition exposed the illegitimacy of his government and earned widespread international recognition by the EU, OAS and several Latin American democracies, among others. EOM’s (Electoral Observing Missions) are crucial to uphold democratic standards and safeguard human rights worldwide, as stated in the Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation. In Venezuela, EOMs’ activities have been restrained by the continuous legislative changes. It’s important to observe that, in 2010, the term “Observation” was replaced with “Accompaniement”, and in 2020, it was once again changed into “Monitoring”. These alterations could appear to be of superficial nature, but they significantly limited the scope of EOMs, if we consider that their work plan must be approved in advance by the National Electoral Council under current Venezuelan law. Despite this, EOMs could provide for more resilient democratic elections in nations experiencing crisis. The only effective public EOM in the elections of 2024 was Carter Center, an American NGO founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter with the aim to promote human rights, democracy and conflict resolution. The Carter Center mobilized observers and teams in several Venezuelan cities and eventually declared that the electoral process couldn’t be considered democratic under international standards.
Speaking Truth to Power: Machado at Stanford
On November 18th, Maria Corina Machado spoke to a Stanford audience at an event hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She discussed, together with Larry Diamond (Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies), about the election aftermath and possible measures to safeguard democracy. Today, Venezuela sits at the bottom of the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law index, 142nd out of 142 nations, and Machado has described this collapse in sharp terms, asserting that “every single democratic institution has been devastated”.
A Movement of Hope and Unity
Yet, despite such conditions, she insists that Venezuelans have built an extraordinary democratic movement over the past two years, underestimated by the regime, rooted primarily on a vast network of citizen volunteers driven by conviction, rather than resources. “We united a country around common values — human dignity, solidarity, justice, private property, and freedom. We wanted our children back home; we wanted our families reunited.” continued Machado, affirming that, yet even in the face of Maduro’s acts of repression, if the election were held again today, the pro-democracy candidate would receive ninety percent of the vote. The Venezuelan opposition is united, more than ever before, also thanks to growing international support.
Democracy as a Path to Peace
By honouring Machado, the Nobel Committee signaled that peace is not merely the absence of conflict but the presence of democratic justice, civic virtue and institutional resilience. Venezuela’s struggle demonstrates that peace can be built through ballots rather than bullets, through the moral persistence of citizens who choose participation over despair. We should hope that the significance that this award embodies will resonate especially in Hungary, Myanmar, Turkey and Nicaragua, in which democratic institutions have been threatened by similar authoritarian strategies. Citizens of these countries must be motivated by Venezuelans’ civic courage, which represents one of the few paths to restore the strength of the democratic values and, once and for all, establish a strong resistance.
References
Clifton, B. (2024, November 25). Venezuela: Cultivating democratic resilience against authoritarianism. Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee. (2025, October 10). The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 goes to María Corina Machado. Nobel Peace Prize. https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/articles/nobels-fredspris-2025-1
Keough School of Global Affairs [University of Notre Dame]. (2024). Lessons from Venezuela’s democratic collapse: How opposition movements can defy autocratic leaders. Keough School News. https://keough.nd.edu/news-and-events/news/lessons-from-venezuelas-democratic-collapse-how-opposition-movements-can-defy-autocratic-leaders/
Londoño, E. (2025, October 10). Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado wins the Nobel Peace Prize. The New York Times.
Corrales, J. (2015). Autocratic legalism in Venezuela. Journal of Democracy, 26(2), 37–51.
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