CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — President Nicolas Maduro has billed his plans to rewrite the constitution as a battle to restore peace in Venezuela after more than two months of deadly, anti-government unrest. The only problem is just one side is likely to show up.

Friday was the deadline for candidates to register for the July election that will choose 545 delegates to the special convention charged with rewriting the late President Hugo Chavez’s 1999 constitution.

The opposition has all but ruled out participating what it considers a ploy by officials to avoid elections the government would surely lose. The U.S. and several foreign governments have also condemned the proposal for a new charter as anti-democratic.

“Any participation in this process is an act of complicity with the constitutional fraud and whoever partakes will be declared a cohort of the fraud, coup, repression and assassination of Venezuelans who have fallen in the peaceful protests for the sole reason they were exercising their legitimate right to demonstrate,” the opposition Democratic Unity alliance said in a statement this week.