VENEZUELA’S grassroots activists stepped into power as the first National Communal Parliament was inaugurated on Tuesday.

National Assembly president Diosdado Cabello presided as the self-administering communal councils encouraged and financed by late revolutionary leader Hugo Chavez came together for the first time.

The decision to hold the parliament in the National Assembly premises showed that President Nicolas Maduro and the Bolivarian revolutionary forces would not fold in the face of inclement election results last week.

“We will not allow the right and the bourgeoisie, from their new-found positions of power, to surrender our sovereignty, independence and the justice we have constructed during these years of sacrifice,” Mr Maduro declared.

He has already pledged resistance to opposition demands for an amnesty for its members who have been convicted of crimes of violence.

The president has the constitutional right to refuse National Assembly proposals twice before the issue is sent to the Supreme Court.

But the issue us a priority not only for the far-right Popular Will group, whose leader Leopoldo Lopez was sentenced to 13 years in jail for incitement to violence, but the Catholic Church hierarchy that has systematically opposed progressive change in Venezuela.

“There should be an amnesty law because there are a great number of people in jail for crimes related to political actions. For me that is unjust,” said Archbishop of Caracas Jorge Urosa Savino on Sunday.

The ultra-conservative cleric said that Venezuela was gong in the wrong direction because “they want to apply a totalitarian, Marxist and communist model.”

The opposition, which restricted its pre-election political pitch to calls for amnesty and unspecified “change,” came clean at the weekend.

Among their proposals are privatisation of water and electricity, removal of taxes on capital, investment and imports and the return of firms and land taken into public ownership.

They want decentralisation of services and policing, immunity from jail sentences for directors of companies run fraudulently, elimination of state-subsidised food outlets, and strengthening of the private sector in housing, policing and education.