Direct, evidence-led rebuttal of Miraj Dhungana’s proposal for a directly elected president in Nepal. Detailed critique of the main claims and historical evidence supporting parliamentary flexibility over presidential rigidity.
Miraj Dhungana has proposed a directly elected president as the cure for Nepal’s instability. His argument is seductive but built on a foundation of flawed logic and ignored history. It’s time for a direct rebuttal. The evidence shows his solution would not fix Nepal—it would break it completely.
We are facing a critical national debate. Clarity is essential. Let’s examine the central pillars of Dhungana’s argument—and see why each one collapses under scrutiny.
“In a presidential system, incompetents are insulated, not accountable. Flexibility—not rigidity—enables real accountability.”
Dhungana’s claim: A directly elected leader, guaranteed a five-year term, would be “forced to deliver something.”
The debunk: Forced by what, exactly? Incompetent or corrupt presidents are insulated by fixed terms. In a parliamentary system, a failing leader can be removed in weeks; in a presidential system, a failing leader is entrenched for years, absent the extreme frictions of impeachment. That rigidity is not accountability—it’s a shield. See how parliamentary Britain replaced a failing prime minister in just 49 days (Liz Truss, 2022) without a constitutional crisis. Flexibility, not rigidity, is the key to accountability. Duterte in the Philippines delivered thousands of extrajudicial killings; Erdoğan delivered democratic backsliding; Chávez/Maduro delivered economic ruin. Fixed terms empowered their worst impulses rather than correcting them.
“Stable regimes aren’t always good regimes. Parliamentary churn is resilient, not chaotic.”
Dhungana’s claim: End coalition chaos by installing a single, stable executive.
The debunk: You’re confusing government stability with governance quality. Stable autocracies are perfectly “calm” while hollowing the republic. Political science warns that presidentialism often produces policy gridlock (dueling mandates) and regime rigidity. Nepal’s own story under parliamentarism demonstrates responsive flexibility: in September 2025, mass youth-led protests forced K.P. Sharma Oli to resign; within days an interim, consensus caretaker (ex-Chief Justice Sushila Karki) was sworn in—elections scheduled, stability preserved. A rigid presidency would have turned crisis into a constitutional standoff.
“Winner-takes-all rules breed permanent opposition and combustible exclusion.”
Dhungana’s claim: A national vote for one leader will unify the country.
The debunk: Nepal is a plural nation with 142 officially enumerated caste/ethnic groups (2021). A presidential race imposes winner-takes-all logic, empowering the plurality bloc with all executive patronage for five years while everyone else gets nothing. Juan Linz’s classic warning: in presidentialism the losers must wait “four or five years without any access to executive power.” That breeds permanent opposition and combustible exclusion. Sri Lanka’s 1978 executive presidency centralized patronage, feeding ethnic outbidding; by 2022 the system collapsed in crisis. Don’t import a design that fractured our neighbor.
Dhungana diagnoses frequent government turnover. True. But the cause is political practice, not constitutional architecture. Our provinces, running the same parliamentary template, show the same coalition churn—elite incentives and bargaining, not the model, produce instability. (Koshi alone has seen nine governments in seven years.) We don’t need a risky system transplant. We need professional coalition management:
Add transparency rules, fixed budget calendars, and automatic mediation clauses, and coalition “instability” becomes managed pluralism—without hard-wiring a five-year presidency.
Miraj Dhungana’s proposal offers the illusion of a strong hand at the wheel while ignoring that the vehicle he’s designing routinely crashes in countries like ours. The path forward is not to abandon our inclusive parliamentary framework but to mature within it—professionalize parties, discipline bargaining, and adopt proven safeguards. Let’s debunk illusions and get to work on real solutions.
Download Full Report
Access the full debate pack and evidence dossier on Nepal’s executive system, with historic and international data, case studies, and a full bibliography.
Editor's Note
This is the first-draft upload for transparency. Quotations are from primary/official sources cited above. Some items await deeper Nepal-specific case studies and will be updated. Factual corrections: [email protected].
v2.0 - 30 Oct 2025
Initial publication. Evidence pack pending additional RTIs. Updates to follow.