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Nepal parliament vote fails to end stalemate
Agence France Presse - August 6, 2010
Claire Cozens, Kathmandu – Nepal's parliament failed to elect a new prime minister for the fourth time on Friday as the deadlock between the three main parties deepened.
Many lawmakers failed even to turn out for the vote, the latest to be held since the coalition government collapsed on June 30 under intense pressure from the opposition Maoist party.
Neither Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal – better known as Prachanda, or "the fierce one" – nor his opponent, centrist Nepali Congress chief Ram Chandra Poudel, managed to win the 301 votes needed to secure a majority.
The result leaves Nepal facing a sixth week without a functioning government, and analysts warned that the stalemate could cause public confidence in the country's political leaders to collapse.
"This is not just a political crisis, but a constitutional and moral crisis," political commentator Yubharaj Ghimire told AFP.
"If this continues, the political parties will be discredited in the eyes of a public that supported change four years ago," he added, in a reference to the 2006 popular uprising that forced the king to end direct rule and restore democracy.
International concern is growing about the impact of the stalemate in Nepal, which is still struggling to recover from a 10-year Maoist insurgency that cost at least 16,000 lives and ultimately led to the 2008 fall of the monarchy.
The United Nations has urged a swift resolution and India this week dispatched a senior envoy to help resolve the stalemate, which has paralysed the peace process that began when the civil war ended in 2006.
Dahal, whose party holds the highest number of seats in parliament, won just 213 votes, despite intensive efforts by the Maoists to win the support of smaller parties. His opponent Poudel took 122.
The third-largest party, the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (UML), refused to support either candidate, and urged them both to withdraw and open negotiations for a consensus government.
"In view of parliament's failure to elect a new prime minister in the last three rounds of voting, we urge both candidates to withdraw," said Ishwar Pokharel, the party's general secretary.
"The time now is for national consensus, not majority-based government, so that we can conclude the peace process and write the constitution."
Nepal's parliament, or Constituent Assembly, was elected in May 2008 with a two-year mandate to complete the country's post-war peace process and draft a new national constitution.
Lawmakers voted on May 31 to extend its term to give them time to complete the constitution and the peace process, but little progress has been made since then. A fifth vote has been scheduled for August 18.
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