Nepali Congress has withdrawn the candidature of its parliamentary party leader, Ram Chandra Poudel, for the post of the Prime Minister. This brings an end to a seven-month-long process where no candidate was able to muster 301 votes in the house of 601 despite 16 rounds of voting. Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda” had withdrawn from the race after the seventh round.
The trigger for the NC decision was the whip issued by the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) to vote against Mr. Poudel in the seventeenth round, scheduled for Wednesday. This would have resulted in more than 350 MPs from the Maoists and UML voting against Mr. Poudel, eroding any basis for his continued candidature.
In earlier rounds, the UML had abstained from the vote. Party chairman Jhalanath Khanal had pushed the decision to vote along with the Maoists even as other party leaders, including caretaker Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and senior leader K.P. Oli, wanted to maintain their alliance with NC.
On Wednesday morning, both Mr. Nepal and Mr. Oli urged the NC to withdraw to enable political consensus, and maintain the “democratic alliance”. NC then urged Speaker Subas Nemwang and the other parties to defer the voting by a day. But when the others rejected the appeal, the NC held a late evening central committee meeting and took the decision to withdraw before the vote “for the sake of national consensus and unity”. Highly placed NC sources told The Hindu from Kathmandu that once they realised defeat was certain, this was the only way to retain the “moral high ground”, and keep alive the basis for an alliance with the UML in the future.
Speaker Mr. Nemwang will now initiate a new process to elect the Prime Minister after deliberations at the parliamentary business advisory committee.
