Nepal: Can they agree on a prime minister now?
Okay, so I’ve had my breakfast, grabbed a coffee, and arrived back at my machine to see that Nepal’s king Gyanendra has asked the ‘opposition parties’ (they weren’t opposition before last February, but who remembers that?) to put forward their candidate for prime minister. In his address, which was televised (as was his address to take over the country last Febrary), he claimed that ‘”Executive power of the kingdom of Nepal, which was in our safekeeping, shall from this day be returned to the people.”
This is, of course, a tremendous victory for the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have defied shoot-on-sight curfew orders and the dozen or so who’ve been killed defying those curfews, all in an attempt to wrest power away from Gyanendra and restore ‘democracy’, aka the political parties.
There’s a aspect of cunning in the King’s announcement, however, that suggests he may not be done with politics any time soon. The oppositional political parties have recently been united in their protest against Gyanendra, but their history of cooperation is awful to say the least. The last time Nepal had a ‘multi-party democracy’, they couldn’t hold parliament for even a full day without the session breaking into literal chaos as political opponents argued and sometimes physically fought. Now, they must agree on a prime minister. Gyanendra has challenged his opponents to back up their talk, so to speak. He could have scheduled elections and avoided this challenge.
Gyanendra’s public justification for assuming power last February was the political parties’ inability to agree on anything. Now, they must prove him wrong, or he will continue to rule. Of course, not quite forgotten in all this is the Maoists, who had entered into a rather uneasy alliance with the political parties, but only for the purpose of bringing down Gyanendra. How will they react? Do they want their leader to be prime minister? Hmm…
