Nepal: Rastriya Swatantra Party on track to sweep polls

The newly-formed Rastriya Swatantra Party was on its way to sweep the parliamentary elections in Nepal as votes continued to be counted on Saturday.

As of 2.40 pm, the three-year-old party was leading in 78 seats and had won 41 seats, according to The Kathmandu Times.

Polling to elect 275 members of Parliament in the country took place on Thursday. A voter turnout of 58% was recorded.

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 Nepali Congress was ahead in nine seats and had won six.

Rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah, who has been positioned as the Rastriya Swatantra Party’s prime ministerial candidate, was leading ousted Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli by more than 38,000 votes in the Jhapa-5 constituency.

Shah, 35, is the former mayor of Kathmandu.

Oli’s Communist Party of ​Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) was leading in nine seats and had won two.

Nepali Communist Party leader and former Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, widely known as Prachanda, won the Rukum East-1 seat, The Kathmandu Times reported. His party was leading in eight seats and had won two.

Election Commission officials had said declaring the final result could take ​a week, as ⁠counting of proportional representation votes would take some time.

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