Kathmandu . Six political parties have received enough votes under the Proportional Representation (PR) system to become national parties as of Monday evening.
As per the results published by the Election Commission on 7.30 pm Monday, parties of the ruling coalition Nepali Congress and CPN (Maoist Centre), parties of the opposition alliance CPN (UML), Rastriya Prajatantra Party and Janata Samajwadi Party-Nepal, and the newly-formed Rastriya Swatantra Party have crossed the required threshold to become national parties.
As stated in Section 52 of the Political Parties Act 2017, only those parties who win at least one seat under the First-Past-The-Post system and get a minimum of 3 per cent of the total votes counted under the Proportional Representation system in the election for the House of Representatives will be recognised as national parties. So far, only the six aforementioned have met these criteria.
As of the time of writing, UML had received the largest share of the proportional votes. Of the total 9,408,582 ballot papers counted, it had received 2,551,836, which is 27.12 per cent of the total vote.
Nepali Congress (NC), which is the party of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, had received 2,419,995 votes, which is 25.72 per cent of the total vote.
Maoists had won 11.47 per cent of the vote, Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) had 11.33 per cent, Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) had 5.82 per cent and Janata Samajwadi Party-Nepal (JSP-N) had 3.59 per cent.
CPN (Unified Socialist) and Loktantrik Samajwadi Party-Nepal (LSP-N), who are also partners in the ruling alliance, have not crossed the mark to become national parties yet.
A party that is unable to become ‘national’ will not have their election symbol placed in order of their size among other parties in the ballot in the next election and will not receive as many facilities as their counterparts. However, lawmakers elected from these parties are not recognised as independent and have to abide by their party’s statute and whip.
UML is also ahead at the province level. It is ahead in the proportional vote count of all provinces except Madhes and Sudurpashchim where NC is in the lead.
The situation is only slightly different at the constituency level.
By half past six Monday, the Election Commission had put up the details of the PR vote count of 155 constituencies and UML was on top in 68 of them. NC was leading in 48 constituencies while RSP was in front in 14. Maoist Centre led in nine constituencies.
There are 165 electoral constituencies across the country.
