Nepal counts final votes with rapper Shah poised for PM

KATHMANDU: Nepal had two percent of votes left to count on Wednesday after parliamentary elections, with rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah’s centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) having secured a majority.

The 35-year-old Shah’s rise from the capital’s mayor to expected prime minister caps a bold gamble and marks one of the most dramatic results in recent Nepali politics.

The March 5 parliamentary vote was the first since youth-led, deadly anti-corruption protests toppled the government in September.

Shah himself defeated veteran four-time prime minister KP Sharma Oli — whose Marxist-led government was ousted in the violence last year — in his own seat.

Videos of Nepalis copying Shah’s dancing during the elections have been widely shared on social media.

Voters elected a new 275-member House of Representatives, the lower house of parliament, with 165 seats chosen directly and 110 by proportional representation (PR).

In direct elections, RSP won three-quarters of seats, 125 of 165, according to official results.

In the proportional representation vote, RSP has the biggest share — nearly half all ballots so far — with just over 200,000 votes left to count.

“We are close to finishing the counting now,” Election Commission spokesman Narayan Prasad Bhattarai told AFP. “We will have the final number of PR seats soon.”

If final results reflect the current tally, RSP will have secured a landslide victory, a likely total of around 176 seats, just short of the 183 needed for a supermajority.

The calibration of final seat allocations may differ from the exact percentage if votes for small parties that did not make the threshold to win a seat are not included.

Constitutional law expert Bipin Adhikari said it might still take more than a week for Nepal to get a new prime minister.

“Once the commission submits its report to the president, he will call on RSP lawmakers to name the prime ministerial candidate,” Adhikari, a professor at Kathmandu University, said. “Only after that will his appointment take place.”

Nepali Congress, the biggest party in the last parliament, secured 18 seats in direct elections, and the Marxists of now-defeated Oli won nine.