Nepal's Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as Prachanda, delivers a speech before a confidence vote at the parliament in Kathmandu, Nepal, July 12, 2024.

Nepali Prime Minister and former Maoist guerrilla commander Pushpa Kamal Dahal lost a parliamentary vote of confidence on Friday, July 12, barely 18 months after taking office, throwing open the Himalayan republic’s revolving door leadership.

Better known by his nom de guerre Prachanda (“The Fierce One”), Dahal led thousands of insurgents during Nepal’s decade-long civil war but switched to parliamentary politics at the conflict’s end.

The 69-year-old was elected prime minister for a third time in December 2022 but will be forced to stand down again after coalition allies withdrew their support. He was able to win the support of only 63 MPs among the 258 present to vote on the future of his government. Dahal will remain in office under a caretaker government until a parliamentary vote to elect his replacement, expected as early as Sunday.

“Someone like Prachanda, who opens the doors of peace with the power of a revolution, may not be born again,” Dahal said, referring to himself in the third person during a speech urging lawmakers to keep him in office. His Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Center) was the third-largest party in parliament after the 2022 election, but he managed to remain in power through deft negotiating.

Post-civil war politics

His brief tenure was nonetheless one of the longest continuous premierships since Nepal’s monarchy was abolished in 2008 at the end of the civil war. Only three other prime ministers had served in office longer than him over that period, and of those only one lasted more than two years. Dahal himself had served as premier on two earlier occasions for less than a year at a time.

Three-time premier K.P. Sharma Oli, head of the larger Communist Party of Nepal – Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) is expected to form the next government with the backing of the center-left Nepali Congress. Oli, 72, is then expected to yield the post to Congress leader and five-time prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, 78, later in the parliamentary term under a deal negotiated between the two parties.

Dahal’s Maoists have played a key role in Nepal’s politics for more than 20 years, after waging a decade-long insurgency against government forces that claimed more than 16,000 lives. The civil war ended in a 2006 peace deal that abolished Nepal’s monarchy and saw the Maoists brought into government, with Dahal the first post-war premier.

Le Monde with AFP

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