Venezuela’s opposition took majority control of the country’s National Assembly on Tuesday after years in the political wilderness, setting the stage for a potential power struggle with embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Lawmakers were sworn in during a heated parliamentary session that saw pro-government representatives walk out in protest after pushing their way onto the dais as the new leadership tried to lay out its legislative agenda.
It is the first time in 17 years, since elections in December 1998, that opponents of the socialist revolution begun by the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez have held a majority in the legislature, and many leaders seemed rapt in disbelief.
Photo: EPA
The opposition won a two-thirds majority in a landslide election victory last month, giving it unprecedented strength to challenge Maduro’s rule. However, that key super-majority is now in doubt after a government-stacked Supreme Court barred four lawmakers from taking their seats at the last minute while it considers allegations of electoral fraud. As a result, only 163 of 167 lawmakers were sworn in during Tuesday’s ceremony.
Earlier in the day, hundreds of opposition supporters accompanied the incoming lawmakers past a heavy military barricade to the neoclassical legislature downtown. A few blocks away, a much larger crowd of government supporters gathered outside the presidential palace to lament the inauguration of what they call a “bourgeois parliament” intent on “legislating slavery.”
The dueling marches were tame compared to the chanting and shoving inside the chamber.
Reflecting the changing political winds, journalists were granted access to the legislature for the first time in years and state TV broadcast interviews with opposition leaders. Conspicuously absent inside the domed building were the oversize portraits of Chavez giving a salute and independence hero Simon Bolivar that had been a fixture for years.
Instead, from the public gallery, the wife of jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez held up a sign reading: “Amnesty Now,” referring to what is likely to be the legislature’s first order of business: a law freeing dozens of activists jailed during anti-government protests in 2014 that resulted in dozens of deaths.
“Keep a strong hand,” 65-year-old Mary Mujica shouted as the incoming parliamentary president, Henry Ramos, muscled his way through the crowd.
“There is a criminal conspiracy running the country; you cannot negotiate with criminals,” she said.
Opposition lawmakers promise sweeping changes, while the socialists have been equally adamant that the legislature not erode social gains of Chavez’s revolution.
The 72-year-old Ramos, a sharp-tongued, pre-Chavez-era politician who beat out moderates in the opposition coalition to take the president’s gavel, reiterated in his inaugural remarks his commitment to a six-month deadline to remove Maduro by constitutional means, echoing demands made by hardliners during the 2014 protests.
Moderates have criticized that strategy and instead advocate pragmatic steps to wrench the economy out of a tailspin marked by triple-digit inflation and the world’s deepest recession.
What unites the two factions is an agenda of probing government corruption and freeing opposition figures that they and many human rights groups consider political prisoners. It is a polarizing issue that also promises to rally government supporters.
“It is completely illogical,’’ the outgoing National Assembly president, Diosdado Cabello, said of the proposed amnesty law. “It is like the assassins pardoning themselves.”
Jennifer McCoy, a longtime observer of Venezuela elections for a pro-democracy group founded by former US president Jimmy Carter, said the coming weeks will tell whether the government and opposition can put aside their mutual hatred.
“This is the moment when both sides need to determine how to move forward: whether they are going to work together or engage in a battle royal,” McCoy said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS