Caracas—Venezuela’s opposition-led legislature is fighting for air as the crisis-hit country’s government throttles it, threatening to cut off its cash and even its electricity.
The National Assembly is the one institutional weapon the opposition has in its fight to oust President Nicolas Maduro, whom it blames for a severe recession, chronic food shortages and mounting chaos.
But since opponents of the leftist leader won control of the legislature in December elections, the Supreme Court has stripped them of their powerful two-thirds majority and quashed about 20 bills they had passed.
The controversial rulings have fueled opposition accusations that the high court is loyal to Maduro.
But the opposition majority refuses to surrender.
“The parliament is judicially neutralized,” said political analyst Luis Vicente Leon, head of the polling firm Datanalisis.
“But it is still the stronghold of the political struggle” against Maduro, he added. “That is where the real battle in Venezuela will be fought.”
Venezuela, the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, has hurtled into chaos with the crash in global crude prices.
Maduro blames the country’s deep recession and hyperinflation on wealthy business magnates he says are conspiring against his government.
The center-right opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), blames the failure of the socialist policies of the past 17 years under Maduro and his late mentor, Hugo Chavez.
With their legislative power stymied, Maduro’s opponents are seeking a referendum on removing him from power before his term ends in 2019.
They are racing to force a referendum by January 10, the cutoff date to trigger new elections — four years into his six-year term.
But with Maduro’s camp accused of stalling, it looks increasingly unlikely the opposition will be able to force a recall vote in time.
That leaves them the legislature.
The National Assembly last week defiantly swore in three of its lawmakers who had been suspended by the high court over alleged electoral fraud.
The opposition denies fraud and calls the court ruling a bald attempt to quash its powerful super-majority.
Maduro responded to the swearing-in by threatening to cut off state funding for the assembly.
“Since this National Assembly is outside of the law, I as head of the public treasury cannot allocate resources” to it, he said on television.
Maduro calls the opposition assembly members “devils.”
“It is a bourgeois assembly, isolated, neutralized and defeated,” he said.
The speaker of congress, Henry Ramos Allup, was defiant.
“The government is trying systematically to neutralize or liquidate the only power which it does not and will not control,” said Ramos, 72, considered Maduro’s top rival.
“But even if they cut off the water, the electricity or the money, this assembly will keep functioning.”
Ramos said the state treasury had not paid for the running of the nursery for assembly workers’ children for two months.
He also said the state electricity company tried shutting off the electricity to part of the assembly’s premises.
But it did not follow through, he said, because it turned out that the same power line serves the national electoral council.
Maduro’s rival says he controls the council, as well as the high court, through his allies.
Ramos has dubbed the court “the government’s legal department.”
The court declared the assembly in contempt this week for reinstating the suspended lawmakers.
Maduro also has the public support of the military. This week he named as his new interior minister senior military official Nestor Reverol, who has been indicted in the United States on drugs-related charges.
“This is a regime totally controlled by the military, where the political will is ignored,” said Ramos.
“It holds all the levers of power except this one,” he said of the assembly.
“That is why they intend to close us in and harass us. But they will not succeed.”