Nepal - Political parties

The 1962 constitution originally prohibited the formation of political parties and associations, even though political groups continued to exist and operate underground, at times on a quasi-legal basis. Parties were legalized in 1990 and now operate freely in Nepal's multi-party constitutional monarchy. The main party through Nepal's modern history—providing nearly all of the country's prime ministers even when the ban on parties prohibited party activity—is the Nepali Congress Party (NC). Inspired by the socialist wing of the Indian National Congress and founded by the Koirala brothers, M. P. and B. P., in 1946, the party led Nepal's first democratic government in 1959. Most of its leaders were imprisoned during the 1960s, but with Indian help, the party operated from India, mounting hit-and-run attacks and maintaining an underground presence in Nepal.

The NC leadership led the opposition to King Mahendra's tiered panchayat system of indirect government. Although NC leaders called for a boycott of the May 1986 elections to the National Panchayat, 1,547 candidates ran for office, and only 40 of the previously elected members retained their seats. After these elections, a Democratic Panchayat Forum (DPF) was formed by NC members to mobilize voters on a non-party basis to counter the influence in local elections of the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN), whose members had won 16 seats in the National Panchayat.

The communist movement in Nepal has been severely fragmented for years by personal and ideological schisms, some of them occasioned by splits and the loss of orthodoxy in the communist movement worldwide in the 1960s and 1980s. Operating for electoral and agitational purposes in the 1980s as the United Leftist Front (ULF), the Communist Party (CPN) and its several communist allies have since split, fragmenting the movement into a number of splinter parties but leaving the CPN, now reassembled as the United Marxist-Leninists (UML) as the leading opposition party in the parliament. The latest elections to the House of Representatives were held on 3 and 17 May 1999. The results were: Nepali Congress (NC), 113 seats; Communist Party of Nepal/United Marxist-Leninist (CPN/UML), 69 seats; National Democratic Party (NDP), also called the Rastriya Prajantra Party, 11 seats; Nepal Sadbhavana Party (NSP), 5 seats; Rastriya Jana Morcha, 5 seats; Samyukta Janmorcha Nepal, 1 seat; Nepal Workers and Peasants Party (NWPP), 1 seat. Elections scheduled to be held on 13 November 2002 were indefinitely postponed by the king.

As of December 2002, the prime minister was Lokendra Bahadur Chand, who was appointed by King Gyanendra on 11 October 2002, after the king removed Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba on 4 October 2002.