Susan Collins had just laid out her receipts.

The five-term Republican senator was standing on a debate stage in Portland earlier this month, explaining how she deserved credit for ensuring concrete and road salt were exempted from President Trump’s Canadian import levies. The move saved one small town in northern Maine $10,000, Collins said. It helped a concrete business owner avoid a $150,000 hike.

It was an updated version of the same argument Collins has been making for decades to win re-election in a state that hasn’t backed a Republican President since George H. W. Bush.

When it was her opponent’s turn to respond, Troy Jackson shrugged. What about everything else going up in price, he asked her, before adding, “We can’t eat road salt.”

For Jackson, the comeback was a hit. It sparked “let them eat road salt” memes of Collins depicted as Marie Antoinette and assuaged some fears among Democrats about how the last-minute replacement candidate would fare in the spotlight. The viral moment also brought into focus the race’s defining issue: Collins herself. Amid a handful of Senate races that will decide which party controls the upper chamber for the last two years of the Trump era, the race in Maine has emerged as the one most decisively about voters’ view of the incumbent.

“He’s got a unique challenge because this race really isn’t about him,” says Emily Cain, a former Maine legislator and Democratic political strategist in the state. “This race is about Susan Collins and asking the people of Maine whether or not it's time for change. He just happens to be the alternative.”

Given the candidate they ended up with, some Democrats are thrilled with this dynamic. Jackson became the nominee after a tumultuous summer in which the state’s Democratic primary winner, Graham Platner, withdrew from the race int he wake of being accused of sexual assault, which Platner has denied. While Platner and Jackson have nearly identical progressive, populist policy platforms, there’s a clear contrast between them in style. Platner is a charismatic, at times gripping, campaigner. Jackson is not. His speeches tend to be more subdued and matter of fact, and he often wears an expression of utter boredom despite being at the center of one of the highest-stakes contests in the country. His affect matches his typical attire on the trail—a Red Sox cap, a fleece vest, his cell phone on a belt clip.

“Troy’s a salt of the earth guy. His biggest strength is his authenticity,” says Toby McGrath, who ran President Barack Obama’s campaign in Maine in 2008 and 2012.

With polls showing Jackson ahead but within the margin of error, both sides have sharpened their attacks. Jackson has repeatedly highlighted a recent report that the FBI and Justice Department had previously sought to open a pay-to-play bribery probe into Collins, allegations, which she denied. And a super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans released an ad calling Jackson a “freak” and a “creep” over his relationship with his second cousin, with whom he has two sons. Last week, Collins distanced herself from the ad and called for it to be taken down.

Yet it’s unclear if any of that is breaking through with voters in a race that could ultimately come down to how Collins ensures Maine isn’t forgotten by Washington. On the stump, she warns voters all that could all disappear if Jackson replaces her.

"He'll be 100 in seniority,” she told Fox News digital earlier this month, “And all of that essential federal funding targeted for the state of Maine, virtually all of it will go away."

Collins’ hold on Maine

For years, Collins has been the immovable stateswoman. She is both Maine’s longest-serving member of Congress and the longest-serving Republican woman in Senate history. Astoundingly, she’s never missed a roll-call vote since taking office in 1997. 

A self-described centrist, she has cultivated a deep connection with Maine’s independent-minded electorate. In 2020, she was reelected by 9 points as Joe Biden carried the state by the same margin.

Collins, 73, has increasingly found herself on the defensive over years of controversial votes, including those confirming Trump cabinet members like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She also cast votes elevating Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Her 2018 vote on Kavanaugh, in which she said she trusted he wouldn’t endanger the right to abortion access, became a flashpoint after the court overturned Roe v. Wade in in 2022. (Collins is also the only Republican senator to vote for all three Democratic-appointed justices currently on the court.)

Most towns in Maine have felt the benefit of Collins’ role as chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, with which she has steered funding for community centers, railroad improvement projects and shipyards. Her campaign puts the total at $1.5 billion in congressionally directed spending and targeted investments since 2021. 

“Even Democrats acknowledge her work to bring funding and support back to the state is just off the charts,” says Lance Dutson, a Republican strategist in Maine. “So people are going to have to make a decision, ‘Do I hate Trump more than I appreciate and need the support Susan Collins has brought to the state over the years?’”

That argument faces more pushback this year given wider dissatisfaction with Republicans and the state of the economy. Jackson has capitalized on those economic anxieties. One of his final ads references high heating oil costs. It’s hitting airwaves just as residents fill their tanks for winter in the nation’s fourth-coldest state. He repeatedly points to Collins' votes related to the conflict in Iran for driving up fuel costs and her vote to advance the Big, Beautiful Bill, a major Republican budget and tax package, for slashing Medicaid in the state.

Last month introduced another chink in Collins’ armor, as a ProPublica investigation revealed that FBI and Justice Department agents sought to open a pay-to-play bribery probe into Collins related to allegations she’d rewarded a campaign donor with millions of dollars in federal naval defense contracts. Collins has denied the allegations, and no charges were ever filed against her or her campaign.

Several Republican and Democratic strategists told TIME they question how effective the corruption argument is landing in tight-knit Maine. “Susan goes to the grocery store, does her own shopping, doesn't live in a lavish house,” Dutson, the GOP strategist said. “People may disagree with her, but I think it’s a big stretch for almost everybody up here to get their head around her being corrupt.”

But the investigation cuts at the core of Collins’ Maine-first brand, McGrath argued, so even a small erosion of support could be the difference in a close race.

‘Troy is not a smooth talker’

As Jackson’s campaign keeps the spotlight on Collins, it’s kept its own candidate somewhat hidden away. Up until recently, Jackson had done very few on-camera interviews, and it was rare for him to take many unscreened questions at campaign events. Local and national campaign staff have feuded over how to showcase Jackson from the early days of the campaign, infighting detailed in an August New York magazine story.

“He has a nationalized campaign team, and these are folks who are generally only comfortable with smooth talkers, and Troy is not a smooth talker,” says a Maine Democrat who worked with Jackson in the state legislature. The Democrat, who supports Jackson, thinks there’s wisdom in trying to avoid gaffes that distract from Collins. Jackson has struggled at times to talk about foreign affairs or federal policy issues, like detailing how to pay for Medicare for All in a conversation with CNN’s Dana Bash in mid-October. 

But other allies of Jackson say an overcautious campaign is impeding the Bernie Sanders progressive and stalwart labor champion from connecting with voters. “A lot of folks don’t know anything about him except that he’s a logger. He has a charming and funny side, and you don't get to see it,” says Betsy Sweet, an activist and political organizer who ran for U.S. Senate in 2020. “The D.C. folks are sure they know everything, and I feel like in so many of our national races they don’t listen to us and they screw it up.”

Jackson has a compelling working-class backstory. His mom was 16 when she had him in Aroostook County, on the rural northern tip of Maine. He grew up poor in Allagash, a frontier town near the Canadian border where he started logging at age 19, taking after his dad, his grandfather and his great-grandfather.

When Canadian loggers started crossing into Maine and taking work away from locals, he helped lead a blockade, driving his truck to the border to halt temporary workers from coming into the state. The protest made headlines but did little to change the situation, and a frustrated Jackson turned his attention to the state legislature. He first ran unsuccessfully as a Republican and eventually got elected in 2002 as an independent. He became a Democrat two years later and rose through the ranks to become Senate president. 

Over decades in state politics, Jackson’s opinions on abortion and LGBTQ rights have evolved. Sweet, who lobbied for women’s groups, recalled pushing him to back abortion-rights legislation in the state. “I think it finally clicked for him after us telling him abortion is health care. It’s not whether women are gonna have one, it’s whether low-income women have the same access as rich women.”

His reputation for having a gruff demeanor, Sweet says, is accurate, but attack ads that portray him as antagonistic toward women go too far. “He will go toe to toe with you. He’s not genteel. You know where you stand with him, but you work it out.”

A shade of that temper came out in the final debate before the election. Jackson told Collins to “shut up” after she accused a protester of being one of his supporters. “It was a stupid thing for him to say,” the Democrat who worked with Jackson in the state legislature says of the debate moment. “Collins is known for her decorum, her civility. He’s courting 55- to 65-year-old women who are all about not being talked down to.”

Maine’s population is the oldest in America and the race will likely come down to older, moderate voters who have split their ticket in past elections. Collins' campaign has argued Jackson has run to the left of the electorate, drawing liberal figures like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to rally with him.

“That they are all campaigning in Maine for Troy Jackson tells voters exactly how he would govern,” Collins campaign spokesperson Blake Kernen said.

For all the debate about whether Jackson’s makeshift campaign has positioned him for victory, it will largely be Collins’ race to win or lose. A September CNN poll of voters backing Jackson found 29% said theirs was a vote for Jackson, while 71% said it was a vote against Collins. Her future in the Senate may not come down to Jackson at all but whether she gives voters enough confidence in what the next six years would look like.

“She’s got an amazing record in the past, but people need to hear from her what she’s gonna do in the future and what the game plan is,” Dutson, the GOP adviser, says. “They need to know, if we send Susan Collins back to Washington, how is that gonna help alleviate the anxiety this administration has been causing me right now?”

The Israeli settlement of Neve Daniel sits south of Jerusalem, atop one of the highest ridges in the West Bank, nearly 1,000 meters above sea level. The view to the east stretches to the mountains of Jordan, and to the west across the Mediterranean coastal plain—where most Israelis live. But the tranquility of the landscape belies the political fervor animating the Oct. 27 election, a contest with stakes as great as any in the 78-year history of the world’s only Jewish state. When I ask three residents what will ultimately determine their votes, one responds with particular ferocity.

“Seven hundred trucks were delivered to Hamas today by Israel,” says Barak Moore, who has lived in Neve Daniel for 14 years. He’s referring to commercial goods and international aid entering the Gaza Strip. “We’re paying a terrorist organization that committed the greatest atrocity against the Jewish people since Auschwitz.”

While much of the world has come to define Israel by its military actions in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, Moore’s views reflect the passions coursing through a society still traumatized by that day. Israelis tend to be less preoccupied by the nearly 75,000 Palestinian fatalities in Gaza since the war began, than by the 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 hostages taken by Hamas—the women subjected to sexual violence, the children shot at point-blank range, the families burned alive in their homes. In a country so small and intimately connected, scarcely anyone was untouched by events that shattered the assumptions of a people whose nation was founded to give Jews a safe haven in their ancestral homeland. 

Both the Hamas massacre and the wars that followed loom over a vote shaping up not only as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, but also the nature of the country that, as Israel’s longest serving prime minister, he has done so much to shape. 

Arrayed against Netanyahu is a fractured field of challengers. There is Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief whose reputation for honesty, sobriety, and competence contrasts with Netanyahu’s polarizing leadership; Naftali Bennett, the right-wing former prime minister seeking a comeback; Yair Lapid, the centrist former premier who has spent years trying to dislodge Netanyahu; and Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish secular nationalist who has become one of Netanyahu’s fiercest adversaries.

Also on the ballot: Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, far-right extremists whose parties made possible Netanyahu’s current coalition, and whose ambitions to annex the West Bank and resettle Gaza constrain his room to maneuver while damaging Israel’s standing abroad. The next government will either push Israel further down the path of religious nationalism, permanent conflict, and international isolation—or toward a new generation of leadership.

According to the polls, Netanyahu’s strongest challenger is Eisenkot, a soft-spoken, heavyset career soldier running as a centrist. His son, Gal, was killed fighting Hamas in Gaza, and one of his nephews also died in the war. Eisenkot is campaigning on a promise to restore public trust in government, rebuild Israel’s security, and heal the divisions that have fractured the country. “This election is about the identity of Israel,” Eisenkot told TIME in an interview on Oct. 20. “What will be Israel two weeks from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? This is the main question.”

Three years after Netanyahu’s political obituary was being written, pre-election polls show him running in a dead heat. On the eve of the vote, the nation is suffused with a sense of uncertainty; political analysts say almost anything can happen. Netanyahu and Eisenkot could form a unity government. Netanyahu could cobble together another right-wing coalition, dragging Israel further right. Eisenkot could join forces with Bennett, Lapid, and the Arab parties (20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian) to oust Netanyahu, producing the closest thing Israel could muster to a center-left government. Or perhaps no bloc will manage to pull together the 61 Knesset seats needed for a majority, plunging Israel into another round of elections and a reprise of the paralysis that produced five contests between 2019 and 2022.

“The most probable scenarios currently are either there will be some sort of unity government, which again is very complicated politically because all of the opposition parties swear they don’t want it under Netanyahu, and I don’t see how Netanyahu is going to sit under them,” says Nimrod Nor, an expert on Israeli politics at Hebrew University. “The other is we’re going to have another election after this one.”

According to two sources familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking, he would prefer to form a unity government with Eisenkot. One reason is legacy. He believes such an alliance offers his best chance to transcend the worst security failure in the nation’s history, and to be remembered not only as the leader who emerged from the slaughter of Oct. 7 to decimate Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and persuade an American president to wage war against Iran, but also as the statesman who helped to reconcile a divided nation.

The other reason, the sources say, is personal. Netanyahu has little desire to form another right-wing coalition that would leave him beholden to the radical and uncompromising parties led by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, both of which he brought into government four years ago to reclaim power. “He thought that he could control Ben-Gvir,” one Netanyahu aide says. “Now he knows that he can’t.”

That is precisely what the Israeli right fears he’s thinking, and what brought me to Neve Daniel. The settlement of capacious red-tiled homes is just across the Green Line that defined Israel’s borders before the Six-Day War of 1967. It was built on land that was a Jewish farm even before Israel was founded in the crucible of the 1948 war. Settler violence against Palestinians has risen sharply during Netanyahu’s tenure, but the militant settlers who make headlines by terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors tend to live on hilltops deeper into the West Bank than this.

But few, if any, of the 700,000 Israelis who live in settlements are leftist. Many regard Netanyahu as a cynical opportunist—a political chameleon who parrots their convictions but will do whatever it takes to survive. Among his many heresies, they say, is a long history of accommodating American presidents: signing the Wye River Memorandum under Bill Clinton to advance the Oslo peace process that aimed to create a Palestinian state; voting for the disengagement from Gaza under Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush; endorsing, at least rhetorically, a two-state solution and imposing a moratorium on settlement construction under Barack Obama; and, under Donald Trump, accepting a ceasefire and hostage-exchange agreement to end the war in Gaza.

Three people in Neve Daniel offer a revealing glimpse of the forces pulling Netanyahu rightward. Each plans to vote for a different party, but they all share an overriding objective: a right-wing government with Netanyahu at its center, constrained by allies who will keep him from drifting toward the middle. 

Barak Moore is supporting Zehut, a libertarian nationalist party founded in 2015, whose eclectic platform combines tax cuts, the dismantling of monopolies, and cannabis legalization with an uncompromising vision of Israeli sovereignty and the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. It is something of a right-wing hipster party, blending free-market economics with religious nationalism.  

Avi Abelow, 52, an activist who runs the website Pulse of Israel, is voting for Netanyahu’s Likud Party. His complaint is not that the prime minister has gone too far in Gaza, but rather that he has not gone far enough, hamstrung by a security establishment and governing coalition insufficiently committed to the nationalist cause. “We should have conquered all of Gaza and made sure it’s Jewish again,” he says.

The youngest of the three, Hershey Kellner, is a 19-year-old Orthodox Jew who moved to Israel from New Jersey just months before Oct. 7. He is supporting Otzma Yehudit, the far-right party led by Ben-Gvir, whose confrontational politics and open contempt for established norms have made him a hero to some of Israel’s most fervent ideologues. Helner admires Ben-Gvir’s push to expand civilian gun ownership, permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, and introduce the death penalty for terrorists. 

To explain his thinking, Kellner invokes one of the most consequential decisions in recent Israeli history: the 2011 deal that freed the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Among them was Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to mastermind the Oct. 7 massacre. Helner believes that sparing Sinwar’s life was a catastrophic mistake. “If you hanged him or put a bullet in the back of his head, not sure how the world would be now,” he says, “but it would definitely be better.”

For three years, Israel has been a nation at war, not only with its enemies but with itself. The extraordinary solidarity that followed Oct. 7 has given way to recriminations and ideological divisions, intensified by the trauma of war, the anguish of the hostage crisis, the pain of deepening antisemitism worldwide, and the unresolved question of who bears responsibility for such a stunning security lapse. Though Israel rejects the charge, critics accuse the country of committing a genocide in Gaza, where the dead include both uncounted Hamas fighters and 20,000 children—and of countenancing a thuggish brand of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. On Oct. 16, masked settlers were filmed attacking Palestinians and European diplomats in the West Bank, and injuring a Washington Post photojournalist.

The fault lines run through nearly every aspect of Israeli life. Secular and religious. Liberals and nationalists. Those obliged to serve in the military and the ultra-Orthodox who are not. Those who believe Israel must reach an accommodation with the Palestinians and those who want permanent Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. And, not least, those who regard Netanyahu as the indispensable guarantor of Jewish security and those who see him as the principal threat to the country’s democratic character and reputation abroad.

The fear increasingly voiced across Israel’s political and cultural establishment is that another Netanyahu victory could push those divisions toward a societal rupture. After Netanyahu’s coalition moved in early 2023 to restrict the power of the Supreme Court, the prospect of another government dependent on religious and ultra-nationalist parties has raised the specter of an exodus of young Israelis, who see the country’s liberal and democratic traditions slipping away. In a recent survey by the Agam Institute, an Israeli research firm, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 59% of Israelis said they believe internal threats are greater than external ones, while 64% said they were considering leaving Israel, citing insecurity, living costs, and political instability. In a nation of roughly 10 million, even the departure of tens of thousands of highly educated citizens could have consequences far beyond their numbers, draining the country of the talent and investment on which its economic and military strength depends.

There is a deeper irony. Israel was founded as a refuge, a place where a people long subjected to persecution and exile could finally determine their own destiny. Some Israelis now contemplate leaving, not because they have lost faith in the necessity of a Jewish state, but because they fear the political direction of the state created to provide one.

For those contemplating a future abroad, there is an unsettling question: Where, exactly, would they go? Antisemitism has surged across much of the world, with 2025 marking the deadliest year for Jews in the diaspora in more than three decades, according to Tel Aviv University.  Israel has become increasingly isolated, condemned in international forums, denounced in the streets of European capitals, and regarded by many critics as a pariah state. The result is a profound paradox: Israelis who fear for their country’s future wonder whether they would be any safer, or more welcome, anywhere else. 

It is this siege mentality, the sense of a small nation standing alone against a hostile world, that Netanyahu is counting on to sustain his political survival. He has spent much of his career presenting himself as a leader hardened by history, experienced in diplomacy, and ruthless in the exercise of power. His message: Whatever Israelis think of him personally, whatever blame they assign him for Oct. 7, the world is too dangerous to entrust their security to anyone else.

The chasm between how Israelis see themselves and how much of the outside world sees them has rarely seemed wider. In the new documentary NAZA, Israeli filmmakers draw on the anonymous testimony of 24 soldiers and intelligence officers to expose what they describe as the military’s systematic use of artificial intelligence to identify Hamas targets in Gaza, even when commanders knew that bombing them would kill women and children. Inside Israel, meanwhile, the fifth season of Fauda, the country’s enormously popular television thriller, recreates the atrocities of Oct. 7 in harrowing detail, immersing viewers once again in the terror, grief, and vulnerability of that day.

One production focuses on the suffering Israel inflicted, the other on the suffering Israelis endured. Together, they illuminate the competing narratives of a war that has left Israel increasingly estranged from the world, and many Israelis feeling more besieged than ever. Indications from polls and analysts are that even after voters have their say, no one bloc will have mustered a legislative majority. At that point the leading vote-getter will have weeks to try to gather a coalition, a test of the kind of political leadership at which Netanyahu has long excelled.

For nearly three decades, Netanyahu has been the dominant figure in Israeli public life, his political fortunes rising and falling with the country’s anxieties and ambitions. He has survived scandals, indictments, electoral defeats, and repeated attempts to engineer his ouster. The question is whether a political system he has spent so long mastering can produce a future that no longer revolves around him.

In a country not yet 80 years old, many are ready to chart a new era. “I think that Eisenkot is the one,” says Livna Savir, 72, at a rally for the challenger on a basketball court in Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, outside of Tel Aviv. “It’s a change of direction.” With her children living in the U.S., she laments the impacts of the last three years on a once unified group: “What happened now in our country—it’s not good for the family.”

Each new release of a frontier AI model, such as Anthropic’s Mythos or OpenAI’s Astra, brings a new wave of speculation over how much closer this takes us to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how much further that lofty goal remains. 

But what if we’re overlooking something more important than an individual model’s supposed IQ?

OpenAI recently announced that an internal model, claimed to be “significantly more capable than GPT‑6 Astra,” solved Navier-Stokes, one of a handful of legendary math problems each carrying a million-dollar bounty. While mathematicians unpack what this means for the profession, and investors unpack what it means for OpenAI’s upcoming IPO, to me the biggest takeaway is that capability emerges from the collective. Just as it does in nature.

OpenAI didn’t crack Navier-Stokes by pointing its internal model at the problem. It pointed a swarm of 10,000 AI bots at it. These agents were encouraged to explore different directions and communicate promising leads with each other. 

Think of what a lone honeybee or termite can accomplish compared to a colony of them. What a single person can accomplish compared to a nation of them.  

In biology, a bacterial colony is a group of identical cells derived from the same mother cell. This, I would argue, is the most suitable analogy for the collective of agents that solved Navier-Stokes. It is many from one. Or, to paraphrase Walt Whitman: an AI that contains multitudes. 

While OpenAI deployed its AI colony to solve a math problem that no human or individual AI agent could, Google DeepMind recently set an AI colony loose on math problems for a different purpose. It wanted to see what behaviors would arise within the colony. What it found was remarkable. 

One agent discovered a way to cheat, convincing the examination software that it had solved math problems when it hadn’t. Rather than resting content with this small victory, it messaged other agents, telling them how to cheat. Some agents joined the unscrupulous agent and formed a sub-colony of cheaters. Others resisted and even formed a sub-colony of whistleblowers trying to out the cheaters. 

As a math professor, I thought it was hard enough to keep students from using AI to cheat on exams. Now we have to worry about the AIs themselves cheating on math exams!

Which brings us to perhaps the most striking example of AI hive intelligence: the Hugging Face hack. OpenAI’s agents broke out of a sandbox environment and hacked into another company. Arguably, it was a felony offense—or rather, it would have been if a human were in charge. OpenAI’s agents coordinated their behavior in ingenious ways, including writing secret messages in a file system so that even when one AI colony was erased, a future colony could pick up the hack where the previous one left off.

Researchers have long known that complex behavior can emerge from simple computer systems. For instance, in 1970 the mathematician John Conway introduced the Game of Life, where an elementary set of rules governing the movement of pixels on a screen leads to remarkably rich ecosystems.

With today’s AI agents, we are going far beyond this by letting extremely sophisticated entities interact in sophisticated ways—using language, often hidden and coded. 

This is why we must adopt a new mindset regarding AI capability. Testing a new AI model to see what it can do and how dangerous it might be by directly prompting it is like deciding how safe it would be to stick your head in a wasp nest by letting a single insect sting you. 

Some developers and red-team activities do focus on AI colonies. The Hugging Face attack resulted from OpenAI trying to evaluate the cybersecurity capabilities of an AI colony. But the AI arms race between the U.S. and China, and between the competing companies within each country, has dangerously pushed our attention to what each individual model can do. 

One model might top the leaderboards, but a thousand weaker models could wreak far more havoc. As calls to pace the frontier abound, let us not lose sight of the fact that the AI frontier isn’t what each model can do in isolation—it is what a colony of them can accomplish together. 

“I am here. With you.”

Venezuela’s popular opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado posted the message on social media platform X Sunday morning local time, announcing her return to the country after more than 10 months in exile.

Machado, who was briefly detained in January 2025 following a protest against autocratic then-President Nicolás Maduro’s swearing-in despite a dubious election victory, went into hiding in Venezuela and emerged in December that year in Norway. Since then, she has been fighting for a return to democracy in her own country, demanding that, following the extraordinary American military operation that captured Maduro, Venezuelans get to have free and fair elections.

The social media accounts of her political movement, Vente Venezuela, as well as her campaign, posted images and videos of Venezuelans crowding the streets of Caracas to welcome her return. The New York Times reported that Machado entered Venezuela from Colombia, citing two anonymized government officials.

https://x.com/ConVzlaComando/status/2114539789047517605

Edmundo González Urrutia, another key opposition figure, also posted on social media Sunday that Machado is “on Venezuelan soil” and that he would soon be with her “so that our country truly advances toward freedom.”

Machado’s return adds some urgency to the country’s democratic transition—which the interim Venezuelan government under acting President Delcy Rodríguez, as well as its apparent overseer, the U.S., have both promised. Rodríguez, who was formerly Maduro’s deputy, and U.S. President Donald Trump have both said that elections will be held in the country, but a date has yet to be finalized.

The 59-year-old Machado, meanwhile, has called for elections by July 2027, telling the Financial Times that there was “more than enough time” to prepare for one. She has also said she will contest the presidency. A majority of Venezuelans want her to be President, according to a poll from AtlasIntel and Bloomberg.

Following Maduro’s ouster, Venezuela’s highest court said Rodríguez’s interim presidential appointment could last for up to 90 days, with the National Assembly potentially extending her term for another 90. But the assembly, controlled by the ruling party, did not vote on extending her term, which officially expired in April.

It remains unclear how Machado could hasten elections, given the Venezuelan government is in talks with a different U.S.-backed faction of the opposition. A third round of talks ended this month without reaching a firm election schedule. Venezuelans have since grown impatient and have taken to the streets to protest the delays.

What the U.S. has said about Machado’s return

Asked about Machado’s return to Venezuela, Trump said Sunday he was unaware of it. “I think she's a very nice woman,” Trump told reporters. “She gave me her Nobel Prize, so how can I say anything else? And I hope she’s safe.”

Machado gave Trump her Nobel medal earlier this year in what appeared to be a push to hasten Venezuela's democratic transition. But since Maduro’s arrest and the U.S. elevation of a new Venezuelan government under Rodríguez, tensions between Trump’s Administration and Machado have increased.

The opposition leader has tried to return to the country multiple times, but she has claimed Venezuelan authorities have repeatedly blocked her. Machado has denied suggestions that the U.S. was blocking her return. But her insistence on returning reportedly roiled some in the White House who worry it could spark a political crisis.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that the conditions that allowed Machado’s return to Venezuela were “the direct result of the U.S. supported reconciliation talks which has already seen hundreds of political prisoners freed and hundreds of political opposition figures return from exile.”

But Rubio also hinted that the U.S. expects no further interference in the ongoing discussions: “The United States expects the freedoms of all sectors of Venezuelan politics to continue to be respected. Likewise, we expect all political actors to support these talks which represent the best chance Venezuela has had in thirty years to peacefully achieve not just a free and fair election but an enduring democracy.”

Machado said earlier that, despite not being a part of the discussions between the Venezuelan government, legislative opposition, and the U.S., her movement will not hinder initiatives that “produce real progress.” 

The U.S. has argued that Venezuela must ensure political and economic stability before it can hold elections. But critics and other observers have pointed out that the Trump Administration’s approach has instead prioritized doing business with Venezuela over facilitating democratic transition—with Washington announcing a major oil deal with Caracas amid the talks.

“She’s a very nice woman,” Trump said of Machado Sunday. “But we’re doing really well in Venezuela.”