The Chinese delegation delegated by President Xi Jinping to unite the ruling Communist Party of Nepal (PNC), riddled with factions, wrapped up its four-day visit on Wednesday, unable to fulfill its goal or even forge an alternative communist-led alliance. for national elections. scheduled for next year, people familiar with the development said.
Guo Yezhou, vice minister of the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, who led a four-member core team of Communist Party leaders, boarded a flight from Kathmandu airport on Wednesday morning after meeting with leaders of the Communist Party of Nepal. including Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli; and his first two internal rivals, former Prime Ministers Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as Prachanda and Madhav Nepal, in recent days.
Prime Minister Oli had responded to a series of attacks by the faction led by Prachanda and Madhav Nepal by dissolving the House of Representatives on December 20 and recommending new elections. He later explained in a televised speech that his decision was a pre-emptive attack against his rivals who were going to present a motion of no confidence against him in Parliament.
Prime Minister Oli’s move has set the stage for a formal split in the ruling CPN that was formed in 2018 by the merger of Prime Minister Oli’s Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist) and the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist Center of Prachanda. The 2018 merger was facilitated by Guo Yezhou from China.
Back in Nepal, 34 months after the February 2018 visit claimed to have helped lay the foundations of the PNC, observers from Nepal said Guo Yezhou worked on various options to retain the dominance of the communist parties in politics. from Nepal during his four-day visit that ended on Wednesday.
The first was convincing Prime Minister Oli to rescind the recommendation to dissolve the 275-member House of Representatives with a guarantee from the PNC’s Prachanda-Madhav Nepal faction that he would let it continue. But Prime Minister Oli disagreed because there was no guarantee that the Prachanda-Madhav Nepal faction would try to overthrow his government and come to power. However, it emerged that Prime Minister Oli told the delegation led by Guo Yezhou that new elections were the only solution to the deadlock between the two sides. Prachanda and Nepal also had not agreed to engage with the Chinese team, demanding that Prime Minister Oli should reverse the order to dissolve parliament first.
Guo Yezhou’s team also explored the possibility of mobilizing an alternative government led by the communist party, but less Prime Minister Oli, should the dissolution be reversed by the five-judge Supreme Court. In this format, the team considered the possibility of gaining the support of Prachanda-Madhav Nepal from opposition parties such as Janata Samajbadi Party chief Baburam Bhattarai, and even Sher Bahadur Deuba’s Nepali Congress. This alternative fits well with the narrative pushed by the opposition parties that points directly to Prime Minister Oli, and not to the Prachanda-Madhav Nepal faction.
The high court is hearing more than a dozen petitions that have challenged the dissolution of parliament on the grounds that there was no provision in the constitution to dissolve the chamber if any party or alliance could mobilize the majority.
In their conversations with both factions of the NCP, the Chinese team also learned that it had raised the possibility that the factions of Prime Minister Oli and Prachanda paper their differences to jointly contest the national elections planned in two phases on April 30 and April 10. of May. and let the electoral verdict decide who leads the next government. Prime Minister Oli, however, rejected this formulation immediately.
Guo Yezhou’s mission in Nepal also reached out to the next generation of Communist Party of Nepal leaders from both camps to push their superiors to keep the party together. Among the NCP leaders from the second tier who met with the Chinese delegations were former ministers Ghanshyam Bhusal, Yogesh Bhattarai and Janardan Sharma from Prachanda camp. From Prime Minister Oli’s camp, the team met with Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali, Energy Minister Barsaman Pun, and permanent committee member Shanker Pokhrel, who are believed to have the confidence of Prime Minister Oli .
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