Opposition assumes control of Venezuelan legislature.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
The Jan. 5 inauguration of the new Asamblea Nacional, Venezuela's 167-member unicameral parliament, marked the start of a complicated and unusual political scenario for the South American nation, whose executive and legislative branches of government - which represent competing forces but are both entirely legitimate, each having been chosen in free and democratic elections - will have to figure out a way to coexist.
For the country to function, the two sides must pursue their respective policy goals with at least a minimum level of harmony, not only between each other, but also within their own ranks. This, in the case of the opposition coalition, seems unlikely, given the ongoing leadership rift between former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles and jailed right-wing politician Leopoldo Lopez. More than four weeks after the coalition's triumph in the Dec. 6 legislative elections, the two men continue to berate each other.
Colombian Ricardo Pardo, editorial director for the Bogota-based newsweekly Semana and one of the journalists most familiar with the Venezuelan political scene, sees the new coexistence phase as both "risky and unprecedented." In an analysis published Dec. 17, he recalled that President Nicolas Maduro and the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), followers of former president Hugo Chavez, were elected to lead the executive branch until 2019 (NotiSur, May 3, 2013), while the opposition coalition, Mesa de la Unidad Democratica (MUD), thanks to its resounding victory in last month's legislative contests, will enjoy a qualified majority in the Asamblea Nacional until January 2021.
The overlap, Pardo explained, promises to be extremely difficult given the conflictive relationship the two blocs have had during the past 17 years, since Hugo Chavez took power in 1999 (NotiSur, Feb. 12, 1999). Chavez died in office in 2013. The situation is all the more worrisome, the analyst wrote, if one recalls how poorly France fared when faced with a similar situation three decades ago. There, the political right defeated the governing Socialist Party in 1986 legislative elections, forcing then-President Francois Mitterrand to designate opposition leader (and future president) Jacques Chirac as prime minister. The resulting "cohabitation" period, as the French called it, proved to be a failure even though relations between the country's competing political groups never reached the level of antagonism now seen in Venezuela.
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