Nepali Congress (NC) General Secretary Gagan Thapa has said that the parties in the previous ruling coalition should apologize to the people for not being able to continue the electoral alliance after the election.
CPN (Maoist Center) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal quit the coalition with NC and CPN (Unified Socialist) and became prime minister (PM) on December 25, 2022 with support of CPN-UML, Rastriya Swatantra Party, RPP, Janata Samajwadi Party (JSP), Janamat Party and Nagarik Unmukti Party after NC President Sher Bahadur Deuba refused to make him PM first.
“There are allegations and counter allegations among us about why that coalition could not be saved,” Thapa said addressing a program in Kathmandu on Wednesday.
He reminded how the parties in the then ruling coalition had assured the people that the coalition will continue for five years while soliciting votes, and pointed that they should apologize to the people for not keeping the promise.
“We should either self-criticize for not being able to save the coalition now after putting the burden of coalition on hundreds of thousands of voters at the time of election or apologize, or say that decision was wrong. We cannot run away from this question. We should either say we had thought another thing and it turned out otherwise.”
Thapa, who was against forging electoral alliance before the election, had earlier told Setopati that parallel dialogues of NC and CPN (Maoist Center) with CPN-UML to form government was blasphemous and stressed that NC, Maoist Center and CPN (Unified Socialist) should not have negotiated with UML or any other party for forming government having forged electoral alliance.
Thapa also claimed that NC will defeat the presidential candidate of UML at any cost pointing that there is fear that the Constitution may suffer an accident if a UML candidate were elected president due to the role played by the UML’s president in the past. “There is no need to hide, we will defeat the presidential candidate proposed by CPN-UML. We will definitely get the candidate defeated,” he stated. “There is fear due to 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 may well be called ‘Right Honorable Puppet President.’ “That president will gradually exercise parallel power. The Constitution will go toward accident when Baluwatar and Sheetal Niwas exercise executive powers. We will get the candidate proposed by UML defeated due to that fear.”
The fear that Thapa pointed at may also be affecting Maoist Center.
Dahal has been recently saying that it would be better if president were elected through national consensus. He even called an all-party meeting at Baluwatar and proposed national consensus be forged for constitutional posts but CPN-UML Chairman KP Sharma Oli rejected the proposal outright.
UML leaders have been claiming that there was agreement about giving the posts of speaker and president to UML before forming the government. But it is not yet known whether the agreement was written or verbal.
Maoist Center has not yet specified what the national consensus that the party is seeking is. But UML suspects that Maoist Center wants to give the post of president to Nepali Congress (NC) in return for the confidence vote to the Dahal government violating the power sharing agreement in the coalition.
Most of the Maoist leaders also seem to be against giving the post of president to UML.
Both UML and NC have already announced that they will field candidates for the presidential election. Maoist Center can prove decisive in the presidential election.
The Election Commission will hold the presidential election on March 9 and the vice-presidential election on March 17.
