By Our Reporter
After learning a lesson from the recently held local polls, the political parties in the ruling alliance are exercising to reach a seat-sharing agreement for the upcoming federal and provincial elections.
Almost all leaders of the ruling parties from Ram Chandra Paudel of NC to Madhav Kumar Nepal of the CPN (Unified Socialist) have been claiming that they will divide the seats before the date of the election is announced. However, a section in the NC is against forging alliances in elections and has threatened to revolt against such alliances. Consequently, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba is under pressure to take the party and coalition together.
PM Deuba and leaders of the other parties in the alliance want to give continuity to the present alliance, but when smaller parties are demanding more seats, the NC is in a difficult situation.
If all goes well, the current coalition of the five parties—Nepali Congress, CPN (Maoist Centre), CPN (Unified Socialist), Janata Samajwadi Party and Rastriya Janamorcha—will be contesting the upcoming poll by forging an electoral alliance, as they did in the local elections.
Seat-sharing, however, is going to become a big headache for Deuba. Top leaders of the Maoist Centre, CPN-Unified Socialist and Janata Samajwadi had already conveyed a message to Deuba that seat-sharing arrangements should be fixed before the poll dates are announced. At the same time, Maoist chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal, United Socialist chair Madhav Kumar Nepal and Janata Samajwadi chairman Upendra Yadav have been holding meetings regularly to form their sub-alliance in an attempt to exert pressure on NC.
If the elections are held by December 10 as suggested by the Election Commission, the government needs to announce the date in a month because the Election Commission needs 120 days for its preparations. In that case, the three coalition partners want an agreement on seat-sharing within July. However, the parties, especially the NC, have not started any work on it. Instead, the parties are wrangling within them to maintain unity. While the Koirala faction in NC has strongly opposed the activities of PM Deuba, Maoist chair Dahal is finding it difficult to pick office bearers while the leaders in the CPN (Unified Socialist) are busy convincing its leaders who were recently removed from the cabinet.
Moreover, Janata Samajwadi Party Nepal is on the verge of a split with growing differences between Upendra Yadav and Dr. Baburam Bhattarai. As such, it looks unlikely that the parties will manage to reach an agreement on seat-sharing in a month. When NC will not be able to accept less than 100 seats of 165 seats under the first-past-the-post election system, the four parties may also not be satisfied with mere 65 seats, which means 20 seats maximum for each of the three big parties.
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