The Rastriya Swatantra Party has won 119 direct seats and is leading in six more in Nepal’s parliamentary elections, consolidating its lead as the process of counting of votes neared its end, The Himalayan quoted the Election Commission of Nepal as saying.
The Nepali Congress has won 17 constituencies, while the Nepali Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) have registered seven victories each.
Polling to elect 275 members of Parliament in the country took place on Thursday.
Of the total, 165 seats are being decided through direct voting. The remaining will be allocated under the proportional representation system, with political parties nominating lawmakers based on the share of votes the parties get.
The leads on Sunday showed that the Rastriya Swatantra Party has received 22,39,870 proportional votes, nearly half of all votes cast nationwide, The Himalayan reported.
Election Commission officials had said that declaring the final result could take a week, as counting of proportional representation votes would take some time.
Rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah, who has been positioned as the Rastriya Swatantra Party’s prime ministerial candidate, defeated ousted Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli by more than 49,600 votes in the Jhapa-5 constituency.
Shah, 35, is the former mayor of Kathmandu.
This was the first general election in Nepal after the widespread protests in September that toppled the Oli government.
The crisis that led to Oli’s ouster had begun following protests sparked by Nepal’s ban on 26 social media platforms on September 4.
Although the Oli government lifted the social media ban on September 8, the agitation snowballed into a broader protest against alleged corruption and misgovernance. A day later, Oli resigned from his post.
At least 72 persons were killed in the protests.
The demonstrations were described as a protest mainly by “Gen Z”, generally referring to persons born between the late 1990s and 2010.
On September 12, Sushila Karki, a former chief justice, was appointed interim prime minister until a new government was formed.
On Thursday, more than 3,400 candidates from 65 parties contested the general election.
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