Nepali Congress (NC) Secretary General Gagan Thapa has said that the parties of the previous ruling coalition should apologize to the people for not being able to continue the electoral alliance after the elections.
CPN (Maoist Center) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal resigned from the coalition with NC and CPN (Unified Socialist) and became Prime Minister (PM) on December 25, 2022 with the support of CPN-UML, the Rastriya Swatantra Party, RPP, Janata Samajwadi Party (JSP), Janamat Party and Nagarik Unmukti Party after NC President Sher Bahadur Deuba refused to appoint him as Prime Minister.
“There are accusations and counter-accusations between us as to why that coalition could not be saved,” Thapa said while addressing a program in Kathmandu on Wednesday.
He recalled how the parties of the then ruling coalition had assured the people that the coalition would continue for five years while they were asking for votes, noting that they should apologize to the people for not keeping the promise.
“We should be self-criticizing for not being able to save the coalition now after placing the coalition’s burden on hundreds of thousands of voters at election time or apologize, or say the decision was wrong. We cannot run away from this question. We should say that we had thought something else and it turned out to be something else”.
Thapa, who was against forging an electoral alliance before the elections, had previously told Setopati that the NC and CPN (Maoist Center) parallel talks with CPN-UML to form a government were blasphemy and stressed that NC, Center The Maoist and CPN (Unified Socialist) should not have negotiated with the UML or any other party to form a government having forged an electoral alliance.
Thapa also stated that NC will defeat the UML presidential candidate at all costs and noted that there is a fear that the Constitution may suffer an accident if a UML candidate was elected president due to the role that the UML president played in the past. “There is no need to hide, we are going to defeat the presidential candidate proposed by the CPN-UML. We will definitely get the candidate defeated,” he stated. “There is fear about the role of presidents in the past. We want to be free of that fear.”
He added that if UML were to get its cadre elected president, that president might as well be called ‘Most Honorable Puppet President.’ “That president will gradually exercise a parallel power. The Constitution will go to the accident when Baluwatar and Sheetal Niwas exercise executive powers. We will get the candidate proposed by the UML to be defeated by that fear”.
The fear that Thapa pointed out may also be affecting the Maoist Center.
Dahal has been saying recently that it would be better if the president were elected by national consensus. He even called an all-party meeting in Baluwatar and proposed that a national consensus be forged for the constitutional posts, but CPN-UML Chairman KP Sharma Oli rejected the proposal out of hand.
UML leaders have been claiming that there was an agreement on giving the posts of chairman and president to UML before forming the government. But it is not yet known if the agreement was written or verbal.
The Maoist Center has not yet specified what the national consensus the party is seeking is. But UML suspects that the Maoist Center wants to give the post of president to the Nepal Congress (NC) in exchange for the vote of confidence in the Dahal government in violation of the power-sharing agreement in the coalition.
Most Maoist leaders also appear to be against giving the UML the role of president.
Both UML and NC have already announced that they will present candidates for the presidential elections. The Maoist Center may prove decisive in the presidential elections.
The Electoral Commission will hold the presidential election on March 9 and the vice-presidential election on March 17.
