Before the start of the Holi week, KP Sharma Oli was already thought of as perhaps the strongest prime minister of democratic Nepal.Following the unification of his CPN-UML (the biggest party in national parliament) and Pushpa Kamal Dahal-led CPN Maoist Center (the third biggest), Oli already commanded a single-party majority in the federal parliament as well as in six of the seven provincial assemblies.

If the current efforts to bring Upendra Yadav’s Sanghiya Samajbadi Forum into the government succeed, then the ruling coalition will have 190 MPs in the 275-strong federal lower house, or over two-thirds of all seats.

That will give the coalition enough votes to amend the constitution, most crucially to make it easier to change provincial boundaries. The forum is close to joining the government because PM Oli has assured it of support for such a constitutional change. As we went to the press, the forum’s participation in the government was all but certain, with negotiations deadlocked not over ideological issues but over distribution of portfolios.

When the forum eventually joins the federal government, Oli will also have great leverage over Province 2, the only province that his communist juggernaut does not currently control. (The forum’s Lal Babu Raut is the chief minister in the province.) But the prime minister is not stopping there to consolidate his power.

This week also saw the prime minister change laws to vest all the residual powers—the powers that, for some reason, have not been delegated to the provinces, the local bodies and to other ministries—in the Prime Minister’s Office. He does not stop there. The PMO will henceforth directly oversee such vital state organs as the National Investigation Department (tasked with strengthening national security), the Department of Revenue Investigation (investigating leakage of taxpayer money) and the Department of Anti-Money Laundering.

From now on, the PMO will also set the guidelines for and monitor NGOs and INGOs. It will also have the power to open new think tanks.
PM Oli now has near absolute power. How he uses it will define his political legacy. It will also set a strong precedent, good or bad, for how the all-important task of institutionalizing the new federal democratic republic pans out.