Nepal's election

The Maoists triumph

Apr 17th 2008 | KATHMANDU
From The Economist print edition

The former rebels surprise everyone with a stunning electoral success. That may prove to have been the easy part

AFP

THE red flags and Maoist slogans on pavements and office blocks in Kathmandu, Nepal's pleasant, down-at-heel capital, were daubed in protest. But this week, as results came in from an election held on April 10th, they assumed a radical new meaning: ownership. Defying every prediction but its own, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), until two years ago a feared rebel army, won handsomely.

A complicated electoral system, in which around 40% of seats are directly elected and 60% through proportional representation, has held up final results. But the Maoists, proscribed by America as terrorists, were on course for a clear majority in the first tranche, with 119 seats out of 224. And they had 33% of the vote in the second. They will certainly be the biggest party, but without a majority, in a 601-seat assembly, which will have a 30-month term limit and will be charged with drafting a new constitution.

The Maoists ended a decade-long armed struggle in 2006, after Nepal's King Gyanendra, who the previous year had seized absolute power, was compelled by street protests to hand it back. Entering a coalition government with six political parties, the scrubbed-up insurgents committed themselves to the democratic process. To many, this looked like either a tactical ploy or noble folly. Led by a charismatic guerrilla, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, or Prachanda (“awesome”, pictured above), the Maoists held sway in much of Nepal. But they were thought to be loathed for their part in a nasty war that left more than 10,000 dead. Most pundits expected them to be trounced at the polls.

They reckoned without three factors. First was the Maoists' manipulation of the result. Thugs from several parties terrorised voters. European Union observers of the election concluded it was held in a “general atmosphere of fear and intimidation”. But the Maoists' thugs were chiefly to blame. The party's candidates also hinted that if it lost, they might resume the war. And no doubt, in the country's many remote and lawless places, some voters wanted the Maoists in faraway Kathmandu—not their forests, stealing their food and pressganging their children.

Yet even near Kathmandu, where some 2,000 foreign election observers were clustered and there were few reports of malpractice, the Maoists won seven of 15 directly elected seats. In the eastern Terai area, next to India, the Maoists had been supplanted by local nationalist groups, both armed and democratic. Yet they have so far won ten out of 27 seats there.

A second explanation for the results is more convincing: that Nepalis were sick of the alternatives. These were chiefly the Nepali Congress (NC) party, which dominates the ruling coalition, and its traditional rival, a mainstream leftist party known as the UML (for “Unified Marxist-Leninist”). Both were tarnished by spells of corrupt and ineffective rule during the 1990s. As for King Gyanendra, he can also take his cue from the electorate. At the Maoists' insistence, the 240-year-old monarchy was provisionally abolished in December—a sentence that the next assembly is due to confirm. This seemed undemocratic at the time; it doesn't now. Nepal's three small royalist parties won no directly elected seat: ie, one fewer than the tiny Nepal Workers' and Peasants' Party, which supports North Korea's Kim Jong Il.

With only 31 directly elected seats, the UML vowed to quit the government. Its leader, Madhav Kumar Nepal, has resigned. The NC, with 34 directly elected seats, is shocked, feuding and outraged by an attack this week by Maoist thugs on a senior member, Ram Sharan Mahat, the finance minister. Many in the NC also want to quit the government, leaving the Maoists with a lonely and difficult command. Apparently as stunned as anyone by the scale of their success, the Maoists prefer to keep the coalition. But they will have the top jobs, including those of the prime, home and foreign ministers.

Under an interim constitution, the seven-party coalition is in fact supposed to stick together until the new constitution is written. Before the election, the NC prime minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, an octogenarian four-time premier, expressed his wish that it last for another decade. Any party that abandons the government may therefore risk being seen as a spoiler of the peace process. For their part, the Maoists want to make the coalition bigger, not smaller, by taking in at least one of several Terai nationalist parties, which won 34 directly elected seats in the south-east.

Managing a fractious coalition is just the start of the Maoists' troubles. The drafting of the new constitution will be a dreadful business. The Terai parties, for example, want extreme provincial autonomy, even the right to self-determination. The Maoists are partly to blame for this, having ostensibly fought for a vaguely defined decentralisation of power. But they are above all nationalists, not leftists, and will certainly disappoint the south-easterners.

And then there is a peace process to salvage. The new government will inherit a huge backlog of peacemaking provisions neglected by its predecessor—including the matter of what to do with the Maoists' 23,000-strong army, which stands armed and organised, under UN surveillance, and the 90,000-strong royalist army. The Maoists say the two forces must be combined. The army, partly at the urging of India, which has unruly Maoist insurgents of its own to worry about, says it will accept no indoctrinated guerrilla into its ranks. As the biggest party of government, the Maoists may now be in a position to insist. However, their deputy leader, Baburam Bhattarai, implies that they will test their new strength carefully. “Before, we were in a stage of making demands; now we are in a stage of implementation,” he said, seated beneath a poster exhorting workers everywhere to unite behind “Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Prachandaism!!”

This last “ism”, which describes the Maoists' struggle as a “bourgeois peasant revolution”, is tricky to pin down. Their economic policies, which include seeking foreign investment for Nepal's hydropower industry, seem quite liberal. Many of their social policies, which the Maoists describe as a war against “feudalism”, are also laudable. Besides scrapping a discredited monarchy, they would fight caste-based discrimination, the deprivation of tribal groups and the exploitation of landless labourers. For poor Nepalis, all this makes a popular message. That is the third—weirdly overlooked—reason for the peasant revolutionaries' great victory. Of course, making big promises is easier than keeping them, and the Maoists will disappoint. The question is: how badly?

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