How the Communist Coalition in Nepal Erodes Democracy
Course: POLSCI 264S-01 Democratic Erosion, Duke University
Instructor: Jason D. Todd
Peer Editors: Garrett Allan, Alice Chen, Shirley Mathur, Yihan Shi
Other Reviewer: Chris Huebner
On 17 May 2018, three months after jointly winning the national elections, Nepal’s two major communist parties, the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) announced their coalition into a unified Nepal Communist Party (NCP). Unlike most communist parties that gained power by violent means, the NCP and its predecessors came to power by free and fair elections and promised to maintain Nepal’s young democracy. However, the NCP’s strong domination in both federal and local legislatures with absolute majority seats in almost every provincial assembly and the Federal Parliament brought concerns and suspension from scholars and international watchdogs.
Recent developments in Nepal have revealed an unsettling fact that the alliance of two communist parties and the formation of the new unified NCP critically endangered Nepal’s newborn democracy by: (1) abusing the nation’s first-past-the-post electoral system; (2) generating flawed and unstable legitimacy to implement stealth authoritarianism; and (3) deepening political polarization and society’s reinforcing cleavage.
Constructing Distorted Representation
According to the 2015 Constitution of Nepal, 165 out of 275 members of the National Assembly and all members of all provincial assemblies shall be elected through first-past-the-post system. This system grants legislative seats to the candidate with the most vote in a constituency, even if the winning candidate has a relatively small majority over the second ranked candidate. As a drawback, this system would produce a significant difference between a political party’s legislature seat proportion and its popular votes received.
This difference was massive during the 2017 Nepalese legislative election. The Nepali Congress, a major opposition party to the communist coalition, received 35.75% of the popular vote in the first-past-the-post segment, yet only acquired 23 seats out of 165, roughly 13% of all seats, according to the Election Commission of Nepal. In contrast, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), which formed an election coalition with the CPN (Maoist Center), received only 30.68% of popular votes, but 80 seats in the same election. The CPN (Maoist Center) was even more rewarded, seizing 36 seats with only 15.03% of popular votes. This results in the communist coalition’s control of 63% seats in total with only around 46% of combined popular votes, generating a huge discrepancy between its parliamentary occupancy and its actual popular support.
The inherent side effect of the first-past-the-post system certainly set grounds for this discrepancy, yet it is the communist alliance’s intentional abuse that considerably intensifies the discrepancy to a critical level. It is apparent their coalition would increase the proportion of seats they received, but this increase was significantly more than would be expected. As the two communist parties allied to jointly nominate candidates, only candidates from one party would be nominated in a constituency, representing the whole communist coalition, to reduce unnecessary competition within the coalition and concentrate the popular votes to one single candidate.
In other words, while it used to be that the CPN(UML), CPN(MC), and NC each received 30%, 30%, and 40% of popular votes, now it would be that the CPN(UML) and NC each received 60% and 40% of popular votes and CPN(MC) received 0% since only CPN(UML) offered candidates for this constituency. This significantly boosted the possibility for the communist candidates to win the first-past-the-post seats, contributed to their overall dominance in the legislatures, and enlarged the inconsistency between the Nepali Congress’s legislative seats and popular votes.
Implementing Stealth Authoritarianism with False Legitimacy
With its election abuse and the consequent inauthentic representativeness, the Nepal Communist Party blatantly constitutes a false legitimacy and attempts to push forward a stealth authoritarianism that secures their ruling position and centralizes more power.
Controlling about 69% and 74% of all seats respectively in the House of Representative and the National Assembly, the NCP allied with the Samajbadi Party dominates the absolute majority in both chambers, the legal requirement of constitutional amendment and a solid guarantee for them to pass any law as they desire. This parliamentary dominance has been taken as the legitimacy to rule by the NCP. “We feel that the people accepted us for stability and prosperity,” said senior CPN-UML leader Pradeep Gyawali. “Our alliance is strong…” (South China Morning Post 2017).
Nevertheless, this legitimacy is fundamentally flawed and unstable. The discrepancy between the NCP’s the parliamentary seat proportion and its popular vote is considerable, with as high as 25% of difference. Given this, it is logically accurate to say that a majority support for some certain bills in the parliament does not necessarily represent a majority support by the general public. This would not be considered a valid democracy even under the rather thin definition by Joseph Schumpeter, whose only requirement for democracy is a governing body that represents people’s opinion.
This self-proclaimed legitimacy also creates potentiality for the general public’s skepticism, anti-government sentiments, and even protests and conflicts. In fact, there’s been a number of reports that validate the public’s skepticism and lack of confidence. An opposition party member Gagan Kumar Thapa’s accused the Nepal Communist Party in January 2019, pointing out that the two-third parliamentary majority “failed to meet the people’s aspiration after securing a landslide victory in the elections” (Samiti 2019). In March 2019, the NCP’s former ally – the Rastriya Janata Party of Nepal – withdrew its support to the government in March 2019. Even the NCP Co-chairperson Pushpa Kamal Dahal himself has asked people to “support the government by keeping their patience” in September 2019 (The Himalayan Times 2019). These skepticism and negative sentiments may further destabilize the young social order in Nepal and decrease the public confidence of democratic institutions.
Regardless of the flawed nature of its nominal legitimacy and the increasing skepticism and opposition from the nation, the NCP still vigorously push forwards stealth authoritarianism to many aspects of Nepalese political and social life. As an example, the NCP facilitated a highly controversial amendment to Nepal’s criminal code in August 2018 with the two-third parliamentary majority. The new law criminalizes a range of ordinary journalistic activities, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, seeking to tighten control on media and crack down politically unfavorable voices. Unsatisfied with the criminal code amendment, the NCP is now pushing another media bill in the name of “purifying the Nepali press” (Budhathoki 2019). Through establishing formal legal mechanisms, the NCP is providing itself with more and more legal grounds to eliminate opponents and silence dissidents, matching Ozan O. Varol’s examination of stealth authoritarianism’s increasing reliance on formal rules.
Apart from their intrinsic damages to democracy, the false legitimacy and the stealth authoritarianism could also generate chilling effects for other political actors as well as the general public, severely reducing their confidence on and willingness of participation in Nepal’s politics, aggravating democratic backsliding.
Deepening Polarization and Social Cleavage
Prior to the unification, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxism-Leninist) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centered) has a series of disagreements and conflicts in many ways. The Maoists used to seek power by violent revolts, “with the aim of imposing a one-party communist regime”; the CPN(UML), however, advocated for a multiparty democratic system and got involved in the parliamentary system after 1990 (Bhattarai 2018). Naturally, the power and influence of both parties once were checked and balanced by each other, rendering a relative stability and power equality in politics among the three stakeholders – the CPN(UML), the CPN(MC), and the Nepali Congress.
The election alliance and the subsequent unification of the two parties broke the equilibrium. The formerly antithetical and even somewhat hostile forces shake their hands for greater political advantages. The electorate that once normally distributed among the political spectrum based on their understanding and preference for different ideologies and policies now gathered into two well-defined groups, locating near each end of the spectrum. The political polarization reached its climax ever since Nepal’s adoption of multiparty parliamentary democracy. “Let there be a polarization of the left and the democratic parties,” said Rabindra Adhikari, a leader associated with the former Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) party before the unification (Shrestha 2017).
Indeed, stable polarization could benefit democracy as McCoy et al. suggest in their article regarding polarization’s influence on democracy, through mobilizing political participation, simplifying choices for voters, and strengthening political parties. Nevertheless, instable polarization and forming alliance merely based on party interests and benefits bring only negative impacts to democracy, like the case of Nepal. The Nepali communist alliance gathers massive popular support from communities with lower average income and ethnically minor communities while the Nepali Congress and allies are generally supported by urban residents, scholars, and political non-governmental organizations. The political cleavage between communists and non-communists uniformly overlaps with social cleavages of income, ethnicity, urbanization, and educational background, potentially endangering Nepal’s societal stability, structural integrity, and even national identity. This could create much more space and chance for the authoritarians to erode Nepal’s premature.
As Milan W. Svolik states in his article “Polarization Versus Democracy”, it is easier for political parties asking their supporters to “trade off democratic principles for partisan interests” in a politically polarized context, which are either derived from party or leader allegiance or specific economic and social benefits (Svolik 2019). Deep social cleavages and acute political tensions, according to Svolik, undermine people’s ability to prevent elected officials from eroding democratic institutions and norms. According to the international research institute BTI’s transformation index report, Nepal’s rating of social integration and political participation has dropped from 4.5 to 4.0 and from 6.8 to 6.3 respectively, between the year of 2016 and 2018.
Conclusions
Blinded by the NCP’s manifesto of maintaining democratic institutions and multiparty parliamentary systems, the global society lacks adequate attention to the communist alliance’s fatal process of seizing parliamentary power with abuses of electoral system and its deeper impact on Nepal’s multilayered society. International watchdogs usually demonstrate concerns of illiberal policies and human rights violations, but always ignore how these policies and violations originated from political alliance and election participation. Only a stronger and more dedicated collaboration among the global and civil society can counterbalance the erosion of democratic institutions and practices from fatal alliances.
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