Driga Narayan Pandey of Nepali Congress (NC) has been elected to the National Assembly from Lumbini on Monday.
Pandey, who recently resigned as provincial lawmaker of UML and joined NC, has defeated Chandra Bahadur Khadka of UML by 546 weighte votes. Pandey received 4,140 weighted votes while Khadka got 3,594.
The weightage of a vote of province assembly member is 48 while it is 18 in case of the chairs/mayors and vice-chairs/deputy mayors.
Pandey was the joint candidate of opposition alliance also including CPN (Maoist Center), Yadav-Bhattarai faction of Janata Samajwadi Party (JSP), Khanal-Nepal faction of UML, and Rashtriya Janamorcha. Khadka was supported by the Thakur-Mahato faction of JSP.
The post was vacant after Khadka was expelled by Maoist Center for joining UML.
Pandey has won the by-election despite the Election Commission granting voting rights to the four lawmakers expelled by JSP less than 16 hours before start of voting.
JSP had expelled Santosh Pandey, Bijay Yadav, Kalpana Pandey and Suman Sharma Rayamajhi from the provincial assembly on April 29 after they joined the Shankar Pokharel Cabinet immediately after the party registered no-confidence motion against Pokharel in coordination with Nepali Congress (NC) and CPN (Maoist Center) on April 19 proposing Kul Prasad KC of Maoist Center as the next chief minister (CM).
But the Supreme Court (SC) on May 17 had ordered to not immediately implement the decision to expel the four lawmakers.
