A dictatorship ends, but now what?

last updated 8 January 2015

Nepal

Nepal’s King Gyanendra is a textbook case of what goes wrong when a monarch starts throwing his weight around, says Thomas Seifert in Vienna’s Die Presse. In January of last year, the king staged a coup and jailed senior politicians, saying tough action was needed to defeat a 10-year Maoist insurgency, in which 13,000 have died. But for the long-suffering people, the move just meant they now had to endure the thuggery of Gyanendra’s soldiers as well as that of the rebels. For weeks protestors have been braving police and curfews, and rather than provoke a bloodbath, the army generals have now forced the king to hand power back to the politicians. This “medieval” monarch still has a lot to answer for, says Kanak Mani Dixit in Kathmandu’s Himal. He appointed his corrupt cronies as ministers and judges, with the result that the entire bureaucracy has been wrecked and the treasury looted. “The people have brought Gyanendra’s nose to the level of mud, and that is where it should remain.”

Now comes the hard part, says Madrid’s El Pais. Gyanendra’s retreat is a triumph for the politicians whose seven-party alliance convinced him the game was up. But they’re a fractious, ineffectual lot, and God knows how they’ll cope with holding elections and creating a new constitution. Their first assembly last week achieved nothing because Girija Prasad Koirala, the 85-year-old veteran they chose as prime minister, was too ill to attend. Plus, they’ve given themselves an unnecessary headache by not insisting the king abdicate, says Sven Hansen, in Berlin’s die tageszeitung. By calling off the protests too soon, they’ve given Gyanendra the chance to hang on and make more mischief. The politicians feared that getting rid of the king would leave the army leaderless and the country ripe for a Maoist takeover. But now they have alienated the Maoists, who insist on the removal of the king as the price of joining the democratic process.