Nepal counts final votes with Shah poised for PM

KATHMANDU

Nepal had 2 percent of votes left to count Wednesday after parliamentary elections, with rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah's centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) having secured a majority.

The 35-year-old Shah's rise from the capital's mayor to expected prime minister caps a bold gamble and marks one of the most dramatic results in recent Nepali politics.

The March 5 parliamentary vote was the first since youth-led, deadly anti-corruption protests toppled the government in September.

Shah himself defeated veteran four-time prime minister KP Sharma Oli, whose Marxist-led government was ousted in the violence last year, in his own seat.

Voters elected a new 275-member House of Representatives, the lower house of parliament, with 165 seats chosen directly and 110 by proportional representation (PR).

In direct elections, RSP won three-quarters of seats, 125 of 165, according to official results.

In the proportional representation vote, RSP has the biggest share, nearly half all ballots so far, with just over 200,000 votes left to count.

"We are close to finishing the counting now," Election Commission spokesman Narayan Prasad Bhattarai told AFP. "We will have the final number of PR seats soon."

If final results reflect the current tally, RSP will have secured a landslide victory, a likely total of around 176 seats, just short of the 183 needed for a supermajority.