The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, presented this Saturday to the National Assembly a constitutional reform project with 80 new articles with the aim of “building a new democratic system” and “the legal, constitutional and political updating of the entire constitutional machinery of the 1999 Constitution.”
“You already know the effort to build a new democratic system and incorporate, as we are incorporating in one of its articles, the concept of the distribution of classic power (…) With this reform I aspire to include expressly, tacitly and broadly, communal power: territorial power, power of the base, popular power; there would be four instances of power, where the fundamental base would be social, communal and popular power,” said the Venezuelan president.
Thus, a new level of power would be created: communal power, adding to the existing national, regional and municipal powers. In his speech, Maduro stressed that the reform seeks to expand and improve participatory and direct democracy, as well as strengthen the democratic State and Venezuelan society.
“I ask for wisdom so that these concepts go from the most to the most, that they go from the fundamental concepts, from the fundamental principles, to the mechanisms and forms of application. Surely many things will be left for the development of laws, as always, organic laws, special laws,” said the president.
“We are ready to open the floodgates of a great and edifying, unifying national debate and for Venezuelan society and our people to be the protagonists of a great historical reform that adapts the 1999 Constitution to the new times with new ideas for progress in a new era of transition to modernity, to the new modernity,” he argued.
Maduro has thus presented three objectives in this reform: Expand and improve Venezuelan democracy, build a new society and modernity, and establish a defined economic model for future generations.
Venezuela held presidential elections on July 28 in which the ruling party gave victory to Nicolás Maduro, although the opposition has claimed victory and has demanded that the authorities present the minutes that would support the president’s reelection.
