For the third time in under a year and half and within a single term, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has won the trust vote in Nepal’s Parliament. In the third iteration, the prime minister got the support of 157 members. A hundred and ten members voted against him, while one abstained from voting. The three instances make an interesting pattern of depreciation in the Parliament’s trust in the prime minister, although the numbers are just signifiers rather than absolute proof of his trustworthiness.

On December 25, 2022, when he sought the first trust vote in an alliance with the CPN-UML and the Rastriya Swatantra Party, Dahal garnered a whopping 268 votes in the 275-strong lower house. It was as if he was everyone's favourite, as the Nepali Congress, the biggest party in Parliament, made one last attempt to woo him. The Congress's trick worked, and Dahal ditched the UML and others within two months to form a new alliance with the Congress. As expected, the vote count came down to 172, with the jilted partners, led by the UML, voting against Dahal.

This time around, the count fell further, but Dahal had a comfortable cushion past the magic number of 138 needed to win the vote. Arithmetically, he has earned the trust vote needed for the parliamentary democratic process despite coming a distant third in the elections, with just 11 percent of seats. But the jugalbandi in Parliament on Wednesday among the top leaders of the top three parties—the Congress, the UML and the Maoist Centre—betrayed the absolutely provisional status of the trust and discomfort the prime minister enjoys.

It was the proverbial stone in the first bite for Dahal as UML chief KP Sharma Oli chided Congress chief Sher Bahadur Deuba, asking him to come to the table for talks. Not one to chew his words, Oli was at once reminding Dahal of the shaky foundations of their partnership even while seemingly taunting Deuba. This was a gross reminder of the first iteration of the trust vote proceedings a year and a half ago when Oli justified his act of dissolving Parliament. Dahal has said more than once that it was this speech that created mistrust between him and Oli and inspired his ultimate partnership with Deuba. With Oli repeating the same recipe this time, Dahal was at once defensive and aggressive when he called for the UML and the Congress to come together to form a coalition. Their mannerisms and words in the Parliament on Wednesday betrayed cold-blooded pragmatism, with not even a smidgen of accountability to the country and the people on display. Top leaders of parties in the same ruling coalition openly taunting each other does not augur well for Nepali democracy—and suggests more political instability is in store.

Be that as it may, Dahal has gained the trust, however quantified, to get him through the next two years. At this point, hardly anyone trusts Dahal to step aside after two years and fulfil the promise of making Oli the prime minister. If anything, the debased debates in Parliament on Wednesday betrayed the untrustworthiness of the political leaders, prompting the people to wonder: Whose trust did the prime minister win anyway?