News update from Nepal, 7 May 2008 News Update from Nepal May 2, 2008 Vote for Change The results of the Constituent Assembly(CA) election on April 10, 2008 clearly favored the Communist Party of Nepal(CPN-Maoist), giving it a relative majority of seats. It emerged as the single largest party in the country with 220 seats followed by Nepali Congress(NC) with 110, Communist Party of Nepal Unified Marxist-Leninist(CPN-UML) with 103, and Madhesi Jana Adhikar Forum(MJAF) with 52 seats. But that none of the parties hold an absolute majority of 301 seats and even a two-thirds majority of 401 in a 601-member CA offers a coalition government as an inescapable choice. The election was hailed by national and international observers as relatively peaceful. The Election Commission(EC) had issued 60,000 cards for national observers and over 800 for inter­national observers. Nepal's election got international attention as former President of the US Jimmy Carter and Japan's parliamentarian G. Hasimoto said Nepal's election"is largely free and fair." On April 8, Carter said,"I see this election as doing two things ba­sically: the first is ending an armed conflict and the second forming a new republic with an end to the dominating royalty." On April 9, King Gyanendra urged all the adult citizens to exercise their democratic right in a free and fair environment and also expressed sat­isfaction over the outcome of the election. Re-polling has taken place in 106 polling cen­ters due to violence and electoral fraud and by-elections will be held for five seats as candidates won from two places. Sixty-one percent of 17,609,408 voters cast their votes to directly elect 240 members through the first-past-the-post system, 335 on a proportional representation(PR) basis and 26 members are to be nominated by the council of ministers. Fifty-four political par­ties out of the 74 registered in the EC had contested the election under the PR system. Of them, only 25 parties have secured their presence in the CA(see table). The pre­election environment was highly violent-prone due to a security and authority vacuum. A number of factors contributed to the Maoist's victory in the election: it introduced the agenda of the CA, republicanism, secularism, federalism and forward-looking transfor­mation which were followed by other parties, its candidates were highly representative of social, ethnic, gender and age diversity and committed to party organization, ideology and leadership, its electoral campaigns were intense, it negatively projected other par­ties as comprador class, corrupt and monarchists, mobilized nationalist sentiments to woo supporters of the king and articulated the Indian expansionism and the US imperial­ism as a threat to Nepal's sovereignty, persuaded Nepalese voters in India to participate in the election, promised social justice, land reforms and emancipation for the downtrod­den classes of society and kept its option open saying that in case it is defeated by con­spiracy it will wage a peaceful revolt. Voters preferred peace to revolt. The defection of many leaders of NC, CPN-UML, Rastriya Prajatantra Party(RPP), RPP-Nepal, Rastriya Janashakti Party(RJP) and Nepal Sadbhavana Party(A) to Tarai groups and the emergence of regional parties, such as MJAF, Tarai-Madhesh Loktantrik Party(TMLP), and Sadbhavana Party(SP) eroded the political base of the mainstream parties. They could not even repair their grassroots connection destroyed during the 1