The Rastriya Swatantra Party, now the largest party in parliament, has put constitutional reform at the heart of its first general convention, reviving one of the most divisive debates in Nepali politics. Re-elected chairman Rabi Lamichhane proposed scrapping the current parliamentary system in favour of a directly elected executive with, in his words, stable leadership and clear responsibilities. He also called for replacing the existing mixed electoral system, which he described as highly expensive, with a fully proportional one to ensure the representation of all communities, and floated turning the National Assembly into a non-partisan chamber of experts chaired by the Vice President.
The idea is far from new. Whether the head of state should be directly elected or chosen by parliament was fiercely contested during the Constituent Assembly years, and when the constitution was promulgated in 2015 with a parliament-selected prime minister, the Maoists filed a note of dissent while the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum boycotted the process. The RSP’s formal revival now realigns familiar camps.
The Nepali Congress and UML are defending a reformed parliamentary system and have floated raising the national-party threshold from 3 to 5 per cent for stability, while the NCP, the Janata Samajbadi Party and former prime minister Baburam Bhattarai back a directly elected presidency and full proportionality. Any amendment, though, depends on arithmetic the RSP does not yet hold, since it has a strong House presence but no seats in the National Assembly. Only if it and the NCP win a combined 40 of 59 Assembly seats, likely hinging on next April and May’s local elections, would such a change become realistic.