VENEZUELAN President Nicolas Maduro warned his country’s right-wing opposition leaders on Tuesday not to stir up violent unrest as the threat of a recall vote against him waned.

National Electoral Council (CNE) president Tibisay Lucena indicated that a recall referendum was unlikely before January next year, the halfway point in Mr Maduro’s six-year term of office. If held by January 10, a successful recall vote would trigger a new presidential election, but after that date Vice-President Aristobulo Isturiz, a popular former teachers’ union leader, would automatically take over.

Mr Maduro lambasted the Democratic Unity Roundtable (Mud) coalition on his weekly TV programme, saying: “The violent plans that you have will be defeated by the conscience of a majority of the people.”

Anti-government protests in 2014 left 43 people dead.

“We’re going to guarantee peace, independence, political sovereignty and the Bolivarian revolution,” he added, in reference to the political programme of his late predecessor Hugo Chavez.

Ms Lucena said the CNE was likely to authorise the MUD’s main drive to collect the four million signatures — 20 per cent of the registered electorate — in late October.

The CNE would then have 29 days to check the petitions — and weed out the numerous fraudulent signatures, as happened in the first two rounds of campaigning — and then 90 days to call a referendum.

Ms Lucena warned the opposition against trying to push the CNE into calling the vote prematurely.

“Those who believe that through political pressure they can chip away at the will of this electoral authority to uphold the law … are wasting their time,” she said.

“This authority accepts pressure from nobody. Our duty is to guarantee the constitutional rights of all the people of Venezuela.

“Every phase of the process has an interval when a technical body is formed in whose strength the possibility of living in peace rests,” Ms Lucena stressed.

“We will continue to carry out our duty to democracy and peace.”

Mud MP Henrique Capriles, leader of the Justice First party, dismissed Ms Lucena’s announcement as “an exercise in cynicism and lies.”

The opposition, which holds a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, has called for a national protest march on September 1.