Nepal’s Parliament will hold a fourth vote to try to elect a new Prime Minister, an official said on Tuesday, after the last election failed to produce a clear winner.
The next vote will take place on Friday, five weeks after former Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal stood down under pressure from the opposition Maoist party, leaving the country without a functioning government.
The resulting leadership vacuum is causing growing concern about the future of the desperately poor country, which has struggled to recover from a decade-long civil war between Maoist rebels and the state.
The Maoists laid down their arms in 2006, transforming themselves into a political party and winning elections two years later. They say that as the largest party in Parliament they should lead the next government.
Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal — better known as Prachanda or “the fierce one” — won the highest number of votes in a two-way race on Monday against centrist Nepali Congress chief Ram Chandra Poudel.
But he failed to secure the overall majority needed to form a new government and the Maoists will now have to try to win over an alliance of smaller parties before voting takes place again on Friday.
“The rules state that we have to keep doing this until one candidate gets a majority,” said Mukunda Sharma, spokesman for the Parliament, or Constituent Assembly.
“It is up to the politicians to get us out of this mess, but there seems to be a serious lack of honesty from political parties towards the process.”
Nepal’s Parliament was elected in May 2008 with a two-year mandate to complete the country’s post-war peace process and draft a new national constitution.
But it has failed to complete either task, hampered by disagreements between the Maoists and their rivals.
Lawmakers voted on May 31 to extend its term to give them time to complete the constitution and the peace process, but little progress has been made since then.