Amid a string of political upheavals in Nepal, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ secured a majority in a vote of confidence on Wednesday.
Dahal faced the floor test for the third time following the constitutional provision stated in the Constitution of Nepal 2072’s Article 100 Sub-section (2) which mandates a Prime Minister to prove a majority in case any parties in the coalition walks out.
PM Dahal secured 157 votes in favour while 110 lawmakers voted against him. One of the lawmakers in the Nepali federal parliament abstained. A total of 268 votes were cast on Wednesday.
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Making a surprise turn on March 4, Prime Minister Dahal decided to revive a coalition with the CPN-UML which caught the largest coalition partner, the Nepali Congress off guard.
A new coalition including the CPN-UML, CPN-Maoist Center, Rastriya Swatantra Party, and Janata Samajwadi Party was initially formed. The following day on March 5, the Nepali Congress formally retracted support to the Dahal government activating Article 100 Sub-section (2).
Notably, a Prime Minister is required to cross the threshold of 50 per cent which is 138 votes as per the present number of parliamentarians.
Whip to vote
All the parties on board the new coalition had issued a whip to vote for Dahal to avoid any floor cross. The largest party in the parliament in terms of seats in the federal parliament, the Nepali Congress also issued a whip to its parliamentarians to vote against Dahal.
The former Maoist rebel leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ came to power in December 2022 when he aligned with arch-rival CPN-UML duping the Nepali Congress with whom he had allied in the November 2022 election.
The vote of confidence on January 10, 2023, resulted in extensive support for Dahal when he got a staggering 99 per cent vote, the highest in the known history of the Nepali parliament since the establishment of democracy. A total of 268 parliamentarians out of 270 present in that meeting had voted in favour of Dahal.
Within three months, Dahal dumped CPN-UML to walk out of government again aligning with Nepali Congress and managed to secure a majority in the vote of confidence on March 20, 2023.
In the second round of the vote of confidence, Dahal got 172 votes out of 262 lawmakers present at the time of voting. Only 89 votes came in against Dahal while one member abstained from voting.