Nepal - Elections - 2017-2018
Elections for the president of Nepal take place on 13 March 2018, with elections for vice president expected shortly after the announcement of presidential results. The vice president can only be elected after a winner is declared in the presidential election due to the constitutional requirement that the president and vice president represent different sexes or ethnic communities.
The promulgation of Nepal's constitution in 2015 initiated Nepal's transition to a federal republic comprised of local, state, and federal governments. Elections for the 753 local-level governments, seven state assemblies and the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Federal Parliament) were completed in 2017, and the election of a National Assembly (the upper house of the Federal Parliament) was completed in February 2018. The elections for president and vice president mark the final electoral event in Nepal’s post-constitutional transition.
Nepal held provincial and parliamentary elections in two phases on November 26 and December 7. The 2017 elections were the final step in Nepal's transition to a federal democracy following a decade-long civil war till 2006 that claimed more than 16,000 lives. The polls took place under a new Constitution passed by lawmakers in September 2015 as part of a peace process that began with the end of a decade-long civil war.
With stiff competition expected from the alliance forged among the CPN-UML, CPN-Maoist Centre and other fringe leftist groups, the ruling Nepali Congress and Madhes-based parties are under pressure to forge electoral alliances across the Madhes districts neighboring India. Police had arrested more than 200 anti-poll protesters belonging to the Communist Party of Nepal, a splinter Maoist group, but the group had not claimed responsibility for the dozens of explosions across the country that targeted candidates.
Gerrymandering is alive and well in Nepal, for sure. The minority Madhesi community is comprised of people living in the lowlands of southern Nepal who share cultural and family ties with India. The Constitution as adopted in 2015 had a federal structure of six provinces, arranged from east to west, each aligned north to south - an arrangement that favored mountain ethnic groups. The Madhesis, who are strung out from east to west, felt did not meet their needs for representation, since their homelands were slivers at the southern tip of each province. They demanded a new demarcation of provinces, proportionate representation, and allocation of seats in the legislature based on population.
The 14 May 2017 elections are to pave the way for provincial and national elections, which need to be held by January 2018 according to the constitution. The first at the local level for nearly two decades left Kathmandu's already divided political establishment in turmoil. Parties representing the Madhesi ethnic group - who have long complained of being politically marginalised - refused to take part in elections without an amendment to the constitution that would redraw federal boundaries. The largest opposition party refused to back any charter changes.
The United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF) is an alliance of Madhes-centric political parties protesting to press to get its demands addressed. Madhes-based parties on 12 April 2017 decided to boycott the local elections slated for May 14 and announced a fresh protest saying the new constitution amendment moved by the government is even more regressive than the previous one. They said the new proposal has not addressed revision of provincial boundaries, the key demand of Madhesis. The Federal Alliance, another bloc of parties demanding the Constitution amendment, also made similar decisions, claiming the amendments proposed were not enough to address their concerns and they ignored previous agreements.
The move by the alliance of seven Madhesi parties threw into disarray the plans of the government led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ to hold polls after a gap of 20 years. More than 70 people had died in Nepal’s southern belt during the anti-constitution movement after major parties in Nepal promulgated the new statute in September 2015 without approval from the Madhes-based parties.
The 2017 elections were the first to be held under Nepal's new constitution, which was officially adopted in 2015 after decades of uncertainty that took the country move on from monarchy and civil war to tentative democracy. Although Nepal finally managed to move on from its brutal civil war in 2006 and ousted its monarchy two years later, the succession of governments since then have been mostly short-lived due to political infighting.
On 12 September 2017 the Election Commission of Nepal announced the schedule of provincial and parliamentary elections to be held in two phases on November 26 and December 7 this year. Polling for the first phase will be held on November 26 from 7 AM to 5 PM. Voting for the second round will be held between 7 AM to 5 PM on December 7. As per the new constitution of Nepal, local, provincial and parliament elections need to be completed by 21 January 2018. Two phases of the local polls had already been conducted on May 14 and June 28 and the final round is scheduled on September 18.
Election rallies, meetings and door to door campaigns are being organised in almost every district. Various social media platforms are also being used to woo the voters especially the youths. Meanwhile, security has been enhanced keeping in view recent attacks on some candidates. Total 5184 candidates including 386 women are in fray for 165 constituencies of House of Representatives and 330 seats of Provincial Assemblies in 77 districts. Of the 1,945 candidates who entered the electoral fray for parliamentary elections, only 146 were women. And only 240 of the 3,239 candidates for provincial elections were women.
On 23 November 2017 the Rashtriya Janata Party Nepal released its manifesto for upcoming parliamentary and provincial election. The main agenda of RJPN are Identity, Right and Respect. The party focused on 15 points including prosperous and developed Nepal, meaningful constitution, inclusive state, equal society and sovereign citizens. RJPN and Sanghiya Samajwadi Froum Nepal are two major political parties of Madhes. They have formed an electoral alliance in Province 2.
Voters elected 275 members to the House of Representatives (HoR) in a mixed system, with 60 percent of representatives chosen through a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, while the remaining 40 percent will be elected through a Proportional Representation (PR) system. The federal parliament is a bicameral legislature, with the 259-member National Assembly (NA) chosen by an electoral college. The HoR and NA will have almost equal powers.
The northern, mountainous region voted on 26 November 2017. There was a high turnout in Nepal's parliamentary and provincial elections, which mark the final stage of a peace process that started in 2006.
Millions of people in southern Nepal voted on 07 December 2017 in the final phase of elections for members of national and provincial assemblies. The two-phase election was the first for the seven provincial assemblies established under the constitution adopted in 2015 after initial rejection from ethnic groups in southern Nepal. The assemblies would name the seven provinces formed under the constitution and draft provincial laws. Several injuries were reported after a number of attacks linked to the elections. The December voting involved about 12 million people in the southern half of the Himalayan country, nearly 80 percent of the population.
People in the southern region, or Tarai, complain of historical underrepresentation of their communities. They say the boundaries of the new states have been drawn to favor the people from the hills, who traditionally dominated Nepal's politics. Politicians from the southern region say the 2015 constitution diluted many of the progressive provisions of the 2007 interim constitution.
The country's parliament is composed of 275 seats, 110 of which are allocated on a proportional representation basis. A left-wing alliance won the majority of seats in Nepal's parliament, preliminary results from the electoral commission indicated. The Communist CPN-UML party and the former Maoist rebels were set to win 84 seats, while the ruling center-left Nepali Congress tumbled to just 13 seats. The leftist alliance campaigned on a hard-line nationalist platform that also incorporated some stark anti-India undertones. The left alliance is perceived as closer to China than to Narendra Modi’s right-wing government in India.
The remainder of the country’s 275 parliamentary seats are elected by proportional representation with the Nepali Congress expected to perform better. The left alliance, however, is set to form the next administration. Communists were also ahead in six out of the seven provincial assemblies.
The new government would likely reinstate Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, who also goes by K. P. Oli, as prime minister. Oli was briefly premier from October 2015 to August 2016, but lost his seat when the Maoists dropped out of a coalition government and Oli faced pressure to resign as leader of a minority government.
The formation of the new government in Nepal has been pushed back until March 2018. An emergency cabinet meeting was held 05 January 2018, after which the date for the National Assembly (NA) elections on 07 February 2018 was announced. The country's election commission will submit the final results of the election, paving the way for the formation of the new government under the Left-alliance leadership by March 2018.
Elections for Nepal's National Assembly, also known as the Upper House of the Federal Parliament, will be held on 08 February 2018. The government's decision to hold the National Assembly elections has come after the Himalayan nation concluded elections to the House of Representatives, the lower house, and Provincial Assembly simultaneously in two phases on Nov. 26 and Dec. 7 last year.
The National Assembly in Nepal, which has 59 members currently, will have around 56 representatives, comprising of eight representatives each from seven provinces. The members would be elected via an electoral college, which will consist of the members of the newly-formed provincial assemblies, along with the chiefs and deputy chiefs of the local bodies. The remaining three members will be appointed by the president of Nepal, upon receiving the government's recommendation.
The new government was expected to be formed under the leadership of KP Sharma Oli, for at least two-and-a-half years. After that, the remaining two-and-a-half years would be completed by Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda.
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