Communist parties set for majority in Nepal

A left-wing alliance has won the majority of seats in Nepal's parliament, preliminary results from the electoral commission indicated late Sunday. According to French news agency AFP, the Communist CPN-UML party and the former Maoist rebels were set to win 84 seats, while the ruling center-left Nepali Congress tumbled to just 13 seats.

"We feel that the people accepted our appeal to vote for the 'Left Alliance' for stability and prosperity," said senior CPN-UML leader Pradeep Gyawali to AFP.

"We will prepare to form a government."

These elections were the first to be held under Nepal's new constitution, which was officially adopted in 2015 after decades of uncertainty that took the country move on from monarchy and civil war to tentative democracy.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres hailed the vote as a "historic moment for Nepal."

Oli likely to return as PM

The new government would likely reinstate Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli (pictured above), who also goes by K. P. Oli, as prime minister. Oli was briefly premier from October 2015 to August 2016, but lost his seat when the Maoists dropped out of a coalition government and Oli faced pressure to resign as leader of a minority government.

Although Nepal finally managed to move on from its brutal civil war in 2006 and ousted its monarchy two years later, the succession of governments since then have been mostly short-lived due to political infighting.

The leftist alliance campaigned on a hard-line nationalist platform that also incorporated some stark anti-India undertones.

Final results from the vote, which took place on November 26, are not expected for at least another ten days because of the difficulty in recent some remote polling areas.