Voting for the federal and provincial assembly elections has finished. We will start to get preliminary results from 37 federal constituencies of 32 districts that went for voting on November 26 in a while. The trend of results will become clear by Friday evening.
Everyone is curious abut which party will emerge victorious and which parties will become national party.
Setopati has observed this election very closely and talked with around 1,500 voters around the country about who they will vote for and how they have taken the election messages of the parties. We have analyzed the results of the recent local election and the second Constituent Assembly (CA) election of 2013.
Setopati has analyzed how the results will turn out taking all these facts into consideration.
Let us first look at which party or alliance will win, or get a majority or even a two-third majority. The main competition is between the democratic alliance led by Nepali Congress (NC) and the left alliance of CPN-UML and CPN (Maoist Center).
There is almost unanimity about the left alliance emerging as the biggest alliance. Many say NC will emerge the single largest party and the left alliance will not get a majority.
There is almost no chance of NC becoming the largest party, according to our analysis based on the votes received in the local election and interaction with the voters.
The current main opposition party UML will emerge the largest party adding the seats won in first past the post (FPTP) and proportional representation (PR) system and the left alliance will get a majority. The only question is about the size of the majority.
Let us look at the votes received by the parties in the second CA election in 2013 and the number of mayors and rural municipality chiefs won in the latest local election.
UML had 184 seats and Maoist Center 84 out of the 601 seats in the second CA election. This means the two parties together had won 268 seats out of 601 (around 44 percent) despite competing with each other and other parties.
UML and Maoist Center also competed with each other in the recent local election. Maoist Center and NC had allied at some places instead. UML alone won 294 mayors/chiefs out of 753 local units, NC 266 and Maoist Center 106. UML and Maoist Center together, in this way, won 400 out of 753 local units (around 53 percent) despite competing against each other.
So, will they get a majority in federal parliament when they have allied?
Some argue that there is a huge difference in the dynamics of local and parliamentary elections, and result in parliamentary elections, therefore, cannot be predicted on the basis that in local elections.
NC, that was weak in the recent local elections, must be strong in two aspects if it were to do better now. The first is it should have better candidates than that of other parties, and the second is it must have an election agenda to attract the voters.
If NC had better candidates, it should have won a lot more seats in the second CA election when UML and Maoist Center had contested separately.
The Maoists were very unpopular then. NC was more popular than UML on the main agenda of peace, stability and democratic constitution. NC became the single largest party in the second CA as a result. But UML and Maoist Center together had won 44 percent of seats then despite contesting separately. We should not forget that the second and the third parties have allied for this election.
Let us now look at the election agendas and popularity.
How the message about election agenda is disseminated to the voters and who the messenger is play an important role in the election apart from the prevailing power balance of the parties.
NC has problem both with the message and the messenger this time. The main message of NC in this election is warning against 'communist autocracy'. But we did not find any voter, out of around 1,500 we spoke to, who has taken that 'threat' seriously. A few traditional NC voters raised the issue but did not stress much on that. We did not find even a single voter who had voted for other parties in the second CA election in 2013 or the recent local election and said they will vote for NC this time against the 'communist autocracy'. This shows that the central agenda raised by NC this time did not attract anyone.
NC President and Prime Minister (PM) Sher Bahadur Deuba is the chief messenger of the party. Deuba was not a popular leader as the country entered the cycle of elections. We found no voter attracted toward him. We found nobody who said he will provide a good leadership if NC wins the election and he becomes a PM. He has more weaknesses than strengths as an election campaigner. He is not just unpopular personally, but also cannot attract voters through good speeches.
NC also will suffer from anti-incumbency this time in a country that has voted out the previous largest party in each general election after restoration of democracy in 1990.
The voters voted for NC against the royalists in the first general election in 1991. It then voted for UML in 1994 and again voted for NC in 1999. They then voted for the Maoists in the first CA election in 2008 and again for NC in the second CA election in 2013.
Maoist Center, that has allied with UML, has almost become an opposition party despite it remaining in the government without any ministries.
The biggest benefit for the left alliance this time is the slogan for 'stable government'. Some voters who have voted for NC also seem excited at the prospect of a stable government of UML and Maoist Center to end political instability. Popular and strong NC leaders are facing tough competition from left alliance even at NC strongholds as a result.
Popularity of UML and its chairman KP Oli has increased in the hilly and mountainous districts due to the role played during the Indian blockade two years ago. UML performed well in the recent local election due to that. Oli is also a more effective messenger than Deuba. There is a significant chunk of voters who feel Oli must again be given a chance to govern the country.
So, how big the majority of left alliance will be?
We do not have data from across the country nor have we reached every constituency of the country to give an exact answer. But we spoke to over 300 voters in Kathmandu-1, 5 and 6, 250 in Gorkha-2, and over 1,000 in Birgunj, Janakpur, Biratnagar and Jhapa.
We did not find any attraction toward the democratic alliance over the left alliance. This means there is no reason for the votes received by UML and Maoist Center in the local election to fall. We have already pointed that UML and Maoist Center together won 53 percent of mayors/chiefs despite contesting the local election separately. We cannot accurately say how many they would have won had they allied.
But we can get some hint if we add the votes received by UML and Maoist candidates in the second CA election in 2013. The left alliance would have won 199 out of the 240 constituencies (around 83 percent) in the FPTP system had the two parties allied and received all the votes received by the two parties. All the votes of one party will not necessarily go for another when two parties but there is also no doubting the fact that the majority of their voters still will vote for the alliance candidates.
Over 70 percent of the UML candidates can win in the FPTP system this time if the majority of the UML and Maoist Center voters were to vote for the alliance candidates because UML would not need many Maoist votes to win in most of the constituencies.
UML has left many constituencies to Maoist Center despite being stronger due to the 60:40 allocation of tickets between UML and Maoist Center. Maoist candidates will face challenge in such constituencies. The number of constituencies the Maoist candidates will win in FPTP system will, therefore, determine the size of the majority of left alliance.
NC had received 26 percent of votes, UML 24 and the Maoists 15 in the PR system in the second CA election in 2013. The vote of big parties increased in the recent local election due to loss of smaller parties. UML received around 34 percent, NC 33 and Maoist Center 17 in the local elections.
Smaller parties will not get into the parliament this time also due to the provision of threshold. The big parties, therefore, will receive popular votes in almost the same proportion that they received in the local election. That means UML and Maoist Center together can get around 50 percent of votes in the PR system. They will get a big majority if they get 50 percent even in PR system.
But will the left alliance get a two-third majority?
The left alliance will have to win 129 seats out of 165 (78.18%) in the FPTP system to get an overall two-third majority. It may not be exactly impossible for the left alliance to win so many seats but will, however, be very difficult.
