Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced Tuesday a "public debate" starting February 15 regarding changes to the constitution he began promoting soon after his third term began despite accusations of fraud.
Reading an article in the Venezuelan constitution adopted in 1999, Maduro said he would have "a public debate based on the constitutional reform that we're going to kick off on February 15 of this year."
Maduro said he wanted "to definitively integrate the popular power" into the constitution, referring to the roughly 49,000 communal councils.
The majority of these locally elected councils consist of government supporters and are responsible for overseeing improvements to public services and distributing subsidised food in urban areas.
The reform will be submitted to a referendum this year on a date yet to be announced.
While Maduro claims "the constitutional reform is to broaden Venezuelan democracy, perfect the Bolivarian constitutional model, and to design the society of the future," critics say the ill-defined project is a move toward restricting democracy in the country.
On January 15, five days after Maduro was sworn in for another six-year term, the president created a commission to reform the current constitution, chaired by Attorney General Tarek William Saab, who also participated in the drafting of the 1999 constitution.
Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores, will also be members of the secretariat.
Maduro was declared the winner of last July’s presidential election, with the National Electoral Council giving him 52 percent of the vote despite never releasing polling station data, claiming it was the victim of a computer hack.
The opposition, which has released its own polling-station-level data, said its candidate Edmundo González Urrutia won in a landslide.
Protests after the election left 28 people dead and nearly 200 injured. More than 2,400 people were arrested, with 1,900 having been released since.
— Times/AFP
Comments