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Nepal Communist Party withdraws from coalition

A major party in Nepal’s ruling coalition quit the government yesterday after dramatic elections losses to former rebels officials said.

Nepalese Foreign Minister Sahana Pradhan said she and her colleagues from the Nepal Communist Party (United Marxist-Leninist) handed the party’s resignation to Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala after a poor performance in the April 10 election.

“All of us in the government from our party gave our resignation to the prime minister, who asked use to reconsider our decision,” Pradhan told reporters after meeting Koirala.

The party was ranking third in the vote count, with only 31 seats — just behind Koirala’s Nepali Congress party, which had 32.

Former communist rebels, who are now known as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists), have so far won 116 seats of the 218 directly elected constituencies where counting has been completed, Nepal’s Election Commission said.

The poll was held to choose the assembly that will rewrite the constitution and decide on Nepal’s future political system.

The prime minister’s aides said the resignations had not yet been accepted.

Final results for the 601-seat Constituent Assembly were still a few weeks off as re-polling has been ordered in several places.

Nepal’s 10-year communist insurgency ended in 2006 when the Maoists agreed to join the political mainstream. The US still considers them a terrorist organization.

Nepal’s election last Thursday directly elected 240 members of the assembly. Another 335 were being selected through a system in which political parties are given seats in proportion to the percentage of votes they received. Twenty-six other seats were to be nominated by the government.

The former rebels appeared almost certain to capture more than half of the 240 directly elected seats, and were doing well in the early count for the 335 proportional representation seats.

In that tally, they have garnered about 1.5 million of 4.5 million votes counted so far. About 10.5 million proportional representation ballots were cast, and clear results from that part of the election were not expected until later this week or early next week.

All the votes have to be counted before seats are allocated.

Some ministers from Koirala’s Nepali Congress were considering withdrawing from the government due to the party’s election showing.

Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat of the Nepali Congress party said a final decision has not yet been made on whether the prime minister’s party would pull out of the coalition.

Revoting has been ordered in 22 constituencies, and was held in six on Tuesday and two yesterday. There was minor disagreement about the voter’s list at one polling station but voting was peaceful in other areas, the commission said.

Election Commission official Laxman Bhattarai said people threw ballot boxes outside the station and burned ballot papers yesterday at Sudhamaji village about 300km west of Kathmandu.

Before the elections, the Nepali Congress was considered the strongest political party followed by the United Marxist-Leninist.

Meanwhile a senior Maoist leader called on the country’s embattled king to step down “gracefully.”

“The best thing for the king would be to bow out gracefully to pave the way for a democratic republic,” Baburam Bhattarai, the Maoists’ second-in-command, said.

The Maoists have said their first act if they gain power will be to sack King Gyanendra and abolish his 240-year-old monarchy.

The senior Maoist official said there was no going back on plans to get rid of the monarchy, meaning that the king had little choice but to go.

“In the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly we will declare the country a republic, then we will notify the king to leave the palace,” Bhattarai said in an interview. “As an ordinary citizen, he will have to abide by the law.”
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