Anti-socialist Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has consistently appeared as the most popular such figure in the country in polls because of her refusal to negotiate with the regime, the president of the polling firm Meganálisis, Rubén Chirino Leañez, told Breitbart News this week.
After over a decade of unsuccessful opposition to the regime of deposed dictator Nicolás Maduro led by politicians associated with the Socialist International, such as Popular Will party leader Leopoldo López and Socialist International Vice President Henry Ramos Allup, Machado has emerged as the most prominent, and popular, challenger to the Maduro regime. Once sidelined by the establishment opposition, Machado has since risen to international prominence after winning the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to reveal that opposition candidate Edmundo González, her stand-in candidate after being banned from running, soundly defeated Maduro in the 2024 shame presidential election.
Machado visited the White House on Thursday with her prize, offering it to President Donald Trump as a gesture of gratitude for his efforts to liberate Venezuelan from socialism, which include approving a high-risk operation to apprehend Maduro in Caracas’s Miraflores palace. Machado explained that the medal was being gifted both in gratitude for Trump’s efforts and in recognition of a 200-year-old gesture in which the son of George Washington gifted a medal to Venezuelan founding father Simón Bolívar.
A Meganálisis poll surveying Venezuelans in all 23 states and the Caracas federal district released on Wednesday found Machado by far the most popular potential presidential contender in a hypothetical free and fair election. Asked, if the election were held today, who would you vote for, 78.3 percent of respondents answered Machado. The second most popular candidate, Interior Minister and paramilitary thug leader Diosdado Cabello, attracted 3.1 percent support. González, the legitimate president-elect of Venezuela following the 2024 election, obtained 1.2 percent support in the poll. Notably, the acting president of the country, Maduro’s top henchwoman Delcy Rodríguez, did not receive enough support to appear in the polling results at all.
“The surge [in support] for María Corina Machado in the last six years is due to her playing a role absolutely opposed to chavismo,” Chirino told Breitbart News in a conversation on Wednesday, “rejecting negotiations and concessions to the same. She pushed forward and realized primary elections within the opposition without the presence of the CNE [socialist National Electoral Center].”
“To do this, she created a citizen’s majority in the country, traveling on land through it all as the chavistas did not allow her to buy plane tickets,” Chirino narrated. “Almost her entire team has been persecuted, she had to go underground, always challenging chavismo. While she took that firm posture, the rest of the politicians in the opposition were cutting deals with chavismo.”
“It was her entire struggle in 2024 that made her deserve the Nobel Peace Prize,” Chirino concluded.
Past Meganálisis polling predating the 2024 sham election and Machado’s successful vote tallying to prove Maduro lost the election showed her significantly more popular than other opposition figures, but still not more popular than not voting at all. In 2023, for example, Meganálisis found that, when asked who they would vote for in a hypothetical presidential election, the plurality of respondents in Venezuela – 29 percent – said “nobody.” Machado came in second place with 22.1 percent. For comparison, Juan Guaidó, the legitimate but powerless president of Venezuela from 2019 to 2022, came in at 4.1 percent in that poll. Guaidó has since been exiled to Florida, where he remains an occasional political commentator.
The strong support for Machado in the January 2026 Meganálisis poll contrasts significantly with the sentiment captured about Rodríguez, the “interim” president following the arrest of Maduro. Asked if they supported Rodríguez leading a transition away from the Maduro regime, 93.5 percent of respondents said “no.” Only 1.9 percent said yes, while the rest did not express an opinion.
“Delcy Rodríguez is the fourth figure in the chavista regime when it comes to leadership,” Chirino told Breitbart News.
The Meganálisis poll found elsewhere that the vast majority of Venezuelans, 92.2 percent, were “grateful” to President Trump for arresting Maduro, a sentiment represented by Machado’s gesture of gifting her Nobel medal to the American head of state. It also contrasts significantly to the eruption of left-wing protests in defense of Maduro throughout the West, which did not appear to attract any Venezuelans.
“I would dare to say, with absolute certainty, that one of the countries with the least left-leaning tendencies in the world is Venezuela,” Chirino explained. “And someone will say, ‘Well that doesn’t seem to correspond [to the socialist regime there]’ – of course it doesn’t correspond, because the country has been abducted by a leftist government system.”
Chirino suggested that years of polling indicates to him that the largest percentage of left-wing Venezuelans in the country stands around seven percent including those coerced through the violence of the regime to claim to support it. Correcting for state coercion, he estimated that about three percent of Venezuelans are accurately represented by leftist pro-Maduro protests abroad.
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