Radicalization? Dialogue? Stagnation? The election of the Constituent Assembly added more uncertainty to a chaotic Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro now has a weapon to govern without limits, despite his low popularity. Here are three possible scenarios of the crisis.
- Radicalization -
The Constituent Assembly was born amid the biggest opposition protests to demand the departure of Maduro, who left about 125 dead and thousands injured and detained in four months.
The president says that the opposition left him no alternative to solve the crisis, but his opponents - who denounce a "wild repression" - say that the aim is to establish a dictatorship to annihilate the few counterweights to the government, such as the Parliament and the Office of the Prosecutor .
"Post-constitutional political and economic radicalization is sung," says the president of the polling station Datanálisis, Luis Vicente León, indicating that the entrenchment will be on both sides.
Opponents, who did not participate in Sunday's vote as fraudulent, announced that they will continue their street fighting, further pushed by the economic collapse.
Political scientist Luis Salamanca warns that "all actors are going to be at risk, some because they can be wiped off the map like opponents, others because by continuing to force the bar can lead to conflicts and ruptures" in Chavismo.
Maduro on Monday urged the constituents to lift the immunity of opposition MPs - a large majority - and "take over" the prosecution, whose boss Luisa Ortega broke with him and denounces a "dictatorial ambition" of the president.
"The hardest and most definitive phase of the confrontation is coming," said Salamanca, adding to Monday's United States sanction against Maduro for a "rupture of the constitutional order."
Washington, which now regards the president as a "dictator," also threatened Venezuela with Venezuela's economic sanctions, which is a major source of oil, virtually its only source of income.
Analysts also envisage international isolation. The United States, Spain and seven Latin American countries are unaware of the Constituent Assembly.
- Dialogue -
Maduro, whose popularity is at 21.8% according to Datanálisis, called Monday a "national dialogue", after revealing that his government maintained recent approaches with the opposition that did not prosper.
At the request of the Vatican, the parties held talks at the end of 2016, which failed between mutual accusations of non-compliance with the agreement.
"The very remote possibility that the regime would seek to exploit this extreme autocratic project to negotiate better terms to overcome the crisis should not be ruled out," said Michael Shifter, president of Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.
The opposition says that any negotiation should have as its starting point a general election, but the government rules out that possibility and says that the bottleneck is the divisions in the opposition leadership.
"The Constituent Assembly is a letter of political power. After its installation (on Wednesday), the government may start negotiating," said social psychologist Colette Capriles.
With the Constituent Assembly "we will see a much weaker, primitive and dangerous country, which will end up doing what would have prevented much pain: negotiating, but in worse conditions," says Luis Vicente León.
A July Datanálisis survey found that 50.1% of Venezuelans strongly disagree with resuming dialogue, against 44.2% who are in favor.
- Stagnation -
Political scientist Francine Jacóme envisions a third scenario in which the current conditions would continue: protests, "repression", demand for early elections, entrenched government trying to buy time and socioeconomic deterioration.
"It would be the maintenance of what we have seen in the last four months," said Jácome, who warns that violence could intensify with a more active presence of "paramilitary groups" linked to the government, which denies its existence.
This analyst notes that the configuration of the Constituent Assembly will be key in any scenario. Even if in practice it will be controlled by a political force, one could "see clearly the different groups and fissures in Chavism," he said.
At the moment, the electoral power has already confirmed the choice of the hard line of the ruling party, which will be the call to handle the threads of the assembly.