(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. shifted strategy on Venezuela, calling on both President Nicolas Maduro and the man it’s backed to replace him, opposition leader Juan Guaido, to step aside and allow the creation of a transitional “Council of State” to set up new elections.

The plan was outlined by the U.S. special representative to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, in an opinion piece published Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal and it comes ahead of a briefing at 10:40 a.m. Washington time by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo.

“Today we are announcing a Democratic Transition Framework to help Venezuelans escape from the national crisis that falling oil prices and the coronavirus have now deepened,” Abrams wrote.

“It proposes that both Mr. Maduro, the former president who has clung to power, and Juan Guaido, the interim president, step aside so that the elected members of the National Assembly from both sides can create a Council of State to serve as the transitional government, which would hold free and fair presidential elections,” Abrams continued.

Guaido has been the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s efforts to oust Maduro for more than a year, but that effort has struggled to gain traction even after the U.S. rallied dozens of nations behind its initiative.

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As part of the effort, the U.S. has ratcheted up sanctions on foreign companies that do business in the South American nation, looking to starve Maduro’s regime of the hard currency it needs to survive. Yet Maduro has hung on with continued support from the country’s military. In his article, Abrams called on the military to shift its role away from repressing its people, expel Cuban intelligence agents and support the transition. He also called for a new electoral council, supreme court and the reestablishment of a free press.

The envoy argued that, despite the U.S. having backed Guaido for the past 14 months, it has never supported any particular party in Venezuela. The U.S. proposal appears to parallel one laid out by Guaido over the weekend to deal with the twin scourges of the coronavirus pandemic and collapsed state income due to the global oil price rout.

Still, it represents a change in the message long sent by the Trump administration. In December, Abrams said, “Juan Guaido has our full support. He is the indisputable leader of the democratic opposition in Venezuela.”

Maduro is taking an increasingly menacing tone toward the opposition.

On Monday evening, he warned of a “knock-knock” operation during a televised address, during which authorities will round up “terrorists” in the coming days to make them “face justice.” By Tuesday morning, Venezuela’s public prosecutor had cited Guaido to appear before his office on Thursday regarding an investigation of an alleged plot to assassinate Maduro.

(Updates with more from Abrams’ article, Maduro’s warning to Guaido starting in seventh paragraph)

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