Nepal: President calls on parties for majority gov't

By Deepak Adhikari

KATHMANDU, Nepal

Nepalese President Bidhya Devi Bhandari on Thursday called on political parties to begin the process to form a majority government, a week after the prime minister resigned from his office.

Pusha Kamal Dahal, popularly known by his nom de guerre Prachanda, stood down to honor an agreement he struck with Sher Bahadur Deuba, the 70-year-old president of Nepali Congress, the largest party in the parliament.

Under Nepalese law, the president is required to call political parties represented in the parliament to form a consensus government. The week-long deadline to form a consensus administration expired on Wednesday.

“The President has urged the lawmakers to elect the prime minister who can garner majority of votes in the parliament,” Mohan Prasad Wagle, the head of state’s spokesman, said in a statement on Thursday.

Deuba, a veteran Nepali politician who has previously held the premiership three times, would return to the hot seat after 12 years.

The leader from the country’s impoverished far western region has presided over a party mired in factional feud and corruption since March 2016.

Nepali Congress, the oldest party in Nepal, has at least three rival factions, with each group pushing for its members for the lucrative ministerial positions.

Local media have reported that Deuba would likely retain a few ministers from his party since they have earned praise for their work.

In a scathing opinion piece for Nepal’s largest-selling Kantipur newspaper, Bishnu Sapkota, a political commentator, described Deuba’s comeback as repetition of a nightmare.

“Despite being prime minister on three occasions in the last 20 years, he has neither accomplished anything worth remembering, nor does he inspire optimism among people,” he wrote in the piece published Wednesday.

Deuba was prime minister when the Maoists, led by Dahal and his deputy Baburam Bhattarai, launched a 10-year insurgency that ended in 2006 in a peace deal after the death of 16,000 people.

The Maoists, now third largest party in the parliament, came to power in August last year after a power-sharing agreement with Deuba’s party.