Hopes for a smooth transition in Venezuela after the opposition prevailed in national elections have been quickly dashed. Despite President Nicolas Maduro's promise to respect the results, his embattled government and its supporters have waged a determined battle to undermine the opposition's victory. The result is a political deadlock that could easily descend into violence and worse.
The Democratic Unity Roundtable, a coalition of center-right forces united primarily by opposition to the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (USVP), won a supermajority — two-thirds of the seats in the 167-member National Assembly — in December's vote. The results did not merely herald the end of 17 years of socialist domination of the Venezuela parliament; the supermajority means that the opposition could rewrite political rules that had entrenched the "Bolivarian Revolution" of the late former President Hugo Chavez.
After the election Maduro said his party would honor the outcome, but those words have proven empty. Instead, shortly after the vote, the outgoing crop of legislators voted in 13 new judges to the Supreme Court in an attempt to stack that institution. Then, days before the swearing in of the new assembly, the Supreme Court blocked four of the new parliamentarians from taking office; while one of the four was a member of the ruling USVP, the loss of the three other seats denied the coalition the supermajority that allows it to rewrite the constitution and replace Supreme Court judges. Finally, last week that same group of lame-duck assembly members approved new government spending bills while Maduro transferred oversight of the Central Bank from the parliament to the president.