VENEZUELAN President Nicolas Maduro launched a sweeping constitutional reform process on Monday to end the nation’s crisis.

Mr Maduro called a national constituent assembly to rewrite the 1999 Bolivarian constitution, the first project of late socialist president Hugo Chavez.

“I call a constituent assembly that will be profoundly communal, from the working class, from the people,” he said.

Mr Maduro said the assembly could help end the wave of political violence currently rocking the country in an echo of 2014’s “guarimba” bloodshed.

“I don’t want a civil war,” he said. “Do you want dialogue? Constituent power! Do you want peace? Constituent power!”

The president appointed former vice-president Elias Jaua as chairman of a preliminary commission, with Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez and lawyer and first lady Cilia Flores as consultants.

The commission will look at ways to bring peace to the country, strengthen the rule of law and order, reform the sordid prison system and wage a “war on impunity.”

It will debate how to build a new economic model to break decades of reliance on oil exports, a key demand of the Communist Party of Venezuela, and the commission will also work on boosting Venezuela’s social-welfare “missions.”

But the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (Mud) coalition dismissed the call for a great national debate as a ploy to avoid its demands — backed by a month of deadly street violence — for early presidential elections.

Parliamentary speaker Julio Borges said: “What the Venezuelan people want isn’t to change the constitution but to change Maduro through voting.”

Masked opposition thugs shot a police officer and attacked a TV crew during anti-government riots on May Day.

Alberto Velazquez was shot in the left leg when a group of militants broke off from the main Mud march and attacked a police station in Merida state after blocking the road with burning tyres. Four suspects were arrested, including a 17-year-old.

Globovision reporter Silvia Montoya, cameraman Rafael Rodriguez and their assistant were menaced by thugs who smashed the windows of their car in Caracas.