Communists Sweep the Nepali Elections
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1528 .... December 19, 2017
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Communists Sweep the Nepali Elections
Vijay Prashad
You might as well imagine a large red flag fluttering from the summit of Mount Everest. That’s what the outcome of the parliamentary and provincial elections in Nepal suggests. The Communists have won both decisively. In the parliament, the Communist alliance will hold close to a two-thirds majority. The government that this majority forms will not only be able to last the full five year term -- the first time this would have happened since Nepal adopted parliamentary democracy in 1990 -- but it will be able to revise the 2015 Constitution.
Both the parliamentary and provincial results show that the Communists won across the country from the countryside to the cities. Even though they have a... strong mandate to govern according to their agenda, the likely Prime Minister K. P. Oli said carefully, "We have seen in the past that victory often tends to make parties arrogant. There is apprehension that the state will become oppressive. Winners tend to become indifferent to their responsibility." This is not something the Communist government will do, said Oli.
What allowed the Communists to win so conclusively? The incumbent, the Nepali Congress, was wracked by corruption scandals, infighting, and the lack of any vision for the country. In 2015-16, when the Indian government closed its border to landlocked Nepal, the Congress could not find the words to condemn India. The Communists, particularly Oli, did not hold back. Nationalist sensibility drained from the Congress toward the Communists. But further, the Congress came to the people for this election with an incoherent alliance, cobbling together a coalition that included the Madhesi parties and the monarchist parties -- parties of minority populations and the king. There was no way that this haphazard alliance could appeal to the people.
The Communists, on the other hand, went to the people with a very simple slogan: "Prosperity Through Stability." Since Nepal emerged from the monarchy in 1990, it has been racked by troubles. Failure to create a democratic process sent one section of the Communists to open up a decade-long armed insurgency that ran from 1996 to 2006. About 17,000 people died in this war, which ended with a new democratic process through a Constituent Assembly. The monarchy was abolished in 2008 and the Constituent Assembly drafted the Constitution of 2015. Nonetheless, there have been 10 prime ministers in the decade since the armed insurgency ended and there has been precious little in the way of social development for the people. It was time for something other than corruption and despondency.
Two of the main flanks of Nepali Communism -- the Maoists and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist - UML) -- decided to go to the polls together and to pledge that they would form a newly united party after the elections. This second call -- for the creation of a newly unified party -- promised even more stability than the electoral alliance. It showed that the Communists -- who had previously been at each other’s throats -- could come together on a joint program. If they could hold that unity, then perhaps they would be able to deliver stable government for five years. This perhaps was most appealing about their campaign. It paid off at the ballot box.
