Nepal – Semi-presidentialism being discussed

Thanks to Matthew Shugart’s Fruits and Votes site for alerting to me to this item. It seems that at least one party in Nepal’s constitution-making process is proposing semi-presidentialism as its preferred form of government.

Recall that Nepal has a Constituent Assembly that is drafting a new constitution. The Assembly has established a Committee on Determination of Forms of the Governance of State. Various parties have submitted proposals to the committee on the type of executive system that the country should have. Nepal News reports some of the parties’ positions:

The Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) supports a directly elected executive president and a less powerful prime minister – the CPN has 220 seats in the 600-seat Assembly;
The Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) supports a directly elected prime minister and ceremonial president – the CPN(UML) has 103 seats in the Assembly;
The Nepali Congress supports the election of the president by the state assembly and the prime minister by the central parliament – Congress has 110 seats in the Assembly.

These are by far the largest groups in the Assembly.

Anyway, at a meeting of the Committee on Determination of Forms of the Governance of State on 1 December The Kathmandhu Post reports that the Congress and CPN(UML) submitted a joint proposal along the lines of what appears to be a parliamentary system, while the CPN tabled their proposal. Apparently, the CPN proposal received 18 votes in favour and 20 against, while the joint Congress/CPN proposal received 16 votes with 21 against.

Basically, there was no agreement, though the proposal for semi-presidentalism received the most support and was supported by the largest party in the system. So, it must stand a reasonable chance of being adopted. That said, while semi-presidentialism is often easy to choose, this is usually because two opposing blocks support presidentialism and parliamentarism. Therefore, semi-presidentialism is the acceptable compromise. In this scenario, because of the explicit support for semi-presidentialism from one party, it may be fundamentally unacceptable to all other players except as part of an overall deal and that may be unlikely.

Note that at the website of the Constituent Assembly there is a guide to constitution making for citizens of Nepal (in English – so I wonder how many citizens have read this version). In chapter 15 there is a brief summary of the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of government, including semi-presidentialism.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *