Amish Raj Mulmi
Among the bevy of Nepali communist parties is the Nepal Majdoor Kisan Party (Nepal Workers Peasants Party or NWPP), which draws inspiration from Juche, North Korea’s doctrine of national self-reliance. Founded in 1975, the party had remained largely on the sidelines of Nepal’s communist movement. Its electoral strength had come almost entirely from its lone stronghold, the Bhaktapur-1 constituency in the Kathmandu Valley, where its candidates had won every general election since 1991. In this year’s Nepali election, however, that decades-long record in Bhaktapur-1 was broken by the upstart Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP). What might have seemed like a local upset was in fact part of a nationwide political upheaval. The RSP went on to secure 182 of the 275 total seats, two short of a two-thirds majority in the lower house of Parliament.
The NWPP’s rout in its home constituency is among the many remarkable stories to emerge from a snap election that has overturned much of the conventional wisdom about Nepali politics. The RSP’s parliamentary majority is the first since the Nepali Congress (NC) secured one in 1999. No election result has been as decisive since Nepal’s first general election in 1959, when the NC won a two-thirds majority. Many observers had doubted that the current electoral system—which combines first-past-the-post and proportional representation—could allow one party to secure a majority.
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