What has happened in Nepali politics in the past 48 hours—as in by late night of Tuesday, when this paper went to print—cannot be explained simply on the basis of mainstream political theory. In the intervening midnight of Monday and Tuesday, when most Nepalis were asleep, septuagenarians Sher Bahadur Deuba of the Nepali Congress and KP Sharma Oli of the CPN-UML sealed a deal to form a new government. Such is the distrust among the new coalition partners that they could not wait until daybreak to meet in their sophisticated offices or even drawing rooms to do so, as they chose the house of a businessman to decide the country’s future course.

That the top leaders of the country’s two biggest political parties had to be brought together to form a new coalition government by an outsider exposes the degenerate nature of our politics. For now, let’s come back to the point about political theory failing to explain the drama that gets performed on the Nepali political stage in the name of constitution and democracy. Perhaps in order to explain the actions of the top three players of Nepali politics—Deuba, Oli, and Pushpa Kamal Dahal— political theorists would want to draw a bit from game theory, whereby the actions of a player are dependent on the possible strategies of another player.

Other things being the same, the Dahal-led government is all but gone thanks to the Deuba-Oli midnight rendezvous. Dahal will likely be replaced by Oli, who will then make way for Deuba after a year and a half—if they stick to their promise. Whether the new marriage of the ideological opposites will survive depends on the checkmates they use against each other on the moral, policy-level and financial corruption committed by each other. The Giri Bandhu tea estate scandal and the fake Bhutanese refugees scandal, in which the UML and the Congress bigshots, respectively, are allegedly involved, are a case in point.

In fact, the foundation for the new coalition was prophetically—or even pathetically—laid over three months ago during Dahal’s floor test in Parliament. Oli, while offering his support to Dahal, had signaled to Deuba of his interest in forming a coalition, to which Deuba had responded with a nod and a smile. It was not difficult to understand that Oli was not very happy to have struck a deal with Dahal, who is well-known for his propensity to change partners in a jiffy; nor was it difficult to get Deuba’s hope amid despair that either Dahal or Oli could come back to him at any point to form yet another coalition. After all, for our old leaders, changing coalition partners is a matter of convenience rather than conviction.

If we are still looking for some silver lining amid the black cloud of political uncertainty, it is this: Dahal’s reputation as a kingmaker-turned-king with just 32 seats in a 275-strong parliament has taken a big jolt. The coming together of the two biggest parties of Parliament is never a good sign for parliamentary democracy, for that leaves us without a strong opposition. But in bringing Dahal to the ground at last, the Deuba-Oli duo has given a message that an electoral pigmy can no longer play a permanent badshah in the game of thrones that is Nepali politics.