The President of Venezuela’s newly inaugurated legislative branch, called the National Assembly, announced the country’s conservatives will attempt to legally oust Socialist President Nicolas Maduro in six months.
According to the Los Angeles Times, National Assembly President Henry Ramos Allup told National Assembly deputies in his inaugural address, “We will recover our autonomous power, pass laws of amnesty and national reconciliation and look within six months for a constitutional, democratic, peaceful and electoral means of ending [Maduro’s] administration.”
Allup’s combative tone is attributable to numerous actions taken by Socialist Maduro following Venezuela’s Dec. 6 legislative elections in which the opposition won a two-thirds supermajority.
One of these actions was stripping the National Assembly of the power to appoint six member to the Central Bank’s Board of Governors. The board decides national monetary policy, and recently Venezuela has been dealing with historically high inflation under the Socialist government.
In an unusual extraordinary session held on Dec. 23, the outgoing Socialist-majority National Assembly appointed 13 judges to join the country’s 23-judge Supreme Court — an action met with frustration by conservatives.
Venezuela’s Supreme Court has since barred three conservative deputies from taking office, and this could strip the party known as MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable) of its two-thirds majority. If the opposition loses its two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, then it cannot do many of the things pledged by National Assembly President Ramos Allup.
Virginia-based independent consultant on the geopolitics of energy and Latin American public policy Gustavo Coronel told The Daily Caller News Foundation via email the ways in which Maduro could be legally ousted:
This could be brought about by:
1. callin (sic) for a national revoking referendum, which is allowed by the Constitution2. Convoking a Constituent Assembly with special powers, also allowed by the Constitution3. By proving the links of Maduro with Narcotrafficking or with money laundering and impeaching him, for which they have the 2/3 majority required4. By proving to the nation that Maduro is incompetent and has brought tragedy to the country5. By an implosion of the Maduro government which is in the brinks of insolvency.The regime might have to default within the next 6 months.
“I give the opposition a 70% chance of ousting Maduro. The regime is very weak and has lost much popular support,” Coronel, who was also a founding member of the board of Venezuela’s national oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. in 1976, said.
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