Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado rejected a proposal, backed by the Brazilian and Colombian presidents, to re-run July 28’s heavily-contested presidential elections. The Venezuelan government would not accept the idea either, a source close to the matter told the Herald.

On Thursday, Brazilian President Lula Da Silva and Colombian President Gustavo Petro floated the proposal of re-running the elections.

United States President Joe Biden initially said that he endorsed the proposal. However, a few hours later, a White House spokesperson said the leader had misunderstood the question.

The idea to re-do the elections was initially floated by Celso Amorim, Da Silva’s advisor on international issues. On Thursday, Amorim told the Brazilian Senate that if the elections were repeated, they would need “strong international supervision.” He ruled out the Organization of American States for the task, arguing that the organism lacks credibility among Latin American progressive governments. He suggested the European Union could take on that role, but that it would need to lift the sanctions against Venezuelan leaders to do so.

“If [Maduro] has common sense, he could call on the people of Venezuela, perhaps even call new elections, create an electoral committee, and allow observers from around the world to monitor them,” Da Silva said in an interview. Petro posted a list of the steps the Venezuelan government could take for a “political solution for Venezuela that will bring peace and prosperity to its people.”

The list included a “transitory government of coexistence” between Chavismo and the opposition and “new, free elections.”

“We went to an election with the rules of tyranny,” Machado said in an interview she uploaded to X. “Many people told me we were crazy, that there would be monumental fraud that we wouldn’t be able to prove. I ask you — we go to a second election and if [the government] does not like the results, then what? We go to a third one? A fourth? A fifth? Until [President Nicolás] Maduro likes the results?”

In the early hours of July 29, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council announced that Chavista President Nicolás Maduro had won the election with 51% of the vote. The government has never provided any data to back that claim. The main opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, claimed he was the true victor. His campaign created a website where they uploaded voting tallies (called actas in Spanish) that his observers collected from polling stations. 

International leaders and observers expressed incredulity at the results Maduro claimed. Argentine President Javier Milei said that Chavismo, the left-wing movement that has been in power since 1999, committed fraud.

On August 1, Da Silva and Petro, together with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, signed a communiqué demanding that the Maduro administration show polling station-level data. The U.S. has rejected Maduro’s victory claim.

On Thursday, United States President Joe Biden answered positively when asked if he supported the call. However, hours later, a spokesperson for the White House confirmed that Biden did not understand the question. “It is abundantly clear that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes,” Sean Savett, the U.S. National Security Council Spokesperson posted on X. “We call for the will of the people to be respected [and] for discussions to begin on a transition back to democratic norms.”

“Lula seems to be playing to see which lifeline will allow him to help Maduro,”  Enrique Lozada García, the press representative in Argentina for Machado and González Urrutia told the Herald. “We must respect the will of each Venezuelan and above all the overall result — here in Argentina, for example, Edmundo González won with more than 90% of the vote.”

The Venezuelan government does not seem keen on the idea either. “In Venezuela, there is a constitution and laws. Nothing more,” a source in the Venezuelan government told the Herald.