In the counting for last week’s constituent assembly election in Nepal, the Maoist ex-guerrillas are ahead. They apparently have won a majority or large plurality of the single-seat districts in the parallel/MMM system: 116 of the 212 for which counting is complete.1
The PR-list votes are not all known, but so far the Maoists are well ahead, though with less than a third of the votes: 32.5%, with the runner-up Nepali Congress at 22.5% and the Communist Party of Nepal at 21.5%.2
Back to the nominal (SSD) tier: Congress has just 33 wins so far and the Communists have 29. If the party-list votes and nominal-tier seats breakdowns reported so far are close to the final shape of the election, it is quite a remarkable result. The Maosists presumably would have won a lot of districts (and perhaps many close races) around the country, rather than primarily in regional strongholds.
Source for preliminary results: Hindustan Times, 15 April.
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The Maoists wound up with half the 240 FPTP seats on just 31.4% of the vote. The party won only a slightly smaller share of list votes (30.5), but list seats have apparently not been determined yet. There are 335 list seats, so they should have around 100 of them, for somewhere around 37% of the whole assembly.
The other FPTP results are given as Congress 37 (21.6% votes), Communist 33 (20.9), Madhesi 30 (5.6; the value of concentration in FPTP!), and various others.
For the four largest parties, there is little difference between nominal and list votes.
The above is according to the page at Wikipedia, which lists the Nepali electoral commission as its source. (I can’t get to the electoral commission website results page myself because it asks one to use Internet Explorer. No, thanks.)
Seed planted by MSS — 28 April 2008 @ 20:47
Interesting link for results
(I hope it’s accurate).
It sure looks like very competitive elections with various communist parties securing together a majority of votes and seats.
Seed planted by Bancki — 29 April 2008 @ 04:14
Various communist parties indeed, some not so communist.
The Maoist leader says “The main thing is that we are against feudalism. We have to have capitalism before we can have socialism. If he had lived another five years, Lenin would have introduced multi-party competition.”
This article notes “There has always been a strong surrealist tinge to politics in the Himalayan nation. Apart from Prachanda’s Maoists, there are several other communist parties of Nepal – the United, the Unified, the Marxist-Leninist and the Unified Marxist-Leninist or UML, the third largest party in the assembly.
“If Mr Gyanendra Shah, the ex-king, wants to form his own political party and enter politics, as many have speculated he might, would the Maoists prevent him? Not at all, says Prachanda, whose benevolence extends even to the former monarch: “If he respects the verdict of the masses, he can enjoy all the opportunities open to the common citizen.”
It is not quite how the Bolsheviks dealt with the Romanovs, but Nepal has a habit of doing things its own unique way. Who knows? Perhaps Gyanendra will call his political vehicle the Communist Party of Nepal (Monarchist).”
Seed planted by Wilf Day — 30 June 2008 @ 22:37