Senior CPN (Unified Socialist) leader Mukunda Neupane has quit the party.

Neupane, who comes third in the party hierarchy after Madhav Kumar Nepal and Jhalanath Khanal, announced deserting the party at a press meet in the Capital on Saturday.

Addressing the press meet, Neupane said the party is trapped in the quagmire of the ruling coalition, accusing the party leadership of being guided by closed-door deals rather than taking decisions from the meetings of the party committees.

“It is more important to live as a respectable citizen than to be a leader of a party that has no future,” he said.

After the party’s poor show in the polls despite forging an electoral alliance with the Congress and the Maoist Centre, Neupane had started saying that Unified Socialist would implode if it continued to remain in the Congress-led coalition.

Neupane, who has rather been giving public statements in favour of unity among the left political parties, had reportedly lobbied for the reunification of the Unified Socialist with the mother party CPN-UML.

Neupane was criticised by Unified Socialist top leaders after he began publicly criticising the party’s decisions.

Unified Socialist sought clarification from Neupane, for speaking up in defiance of party discipline.

Neupane is likely to return to the mother party.

Unified Socialist, which was formed less than two years ago by splitting the CPN-UML, the country’s largest communist party, is gradually weakening as its leaders and cadres are ditching it and drifting back to the mother party.

Earlier, two Unified Socialist leaders—Vice-chair and Bagmati provincial in-charge of the party Kedar Neupane and Standing Committee member Chudamani Jangali— had tendered their resignations, expressing dissatisfaction over the party’s support to the Nepali Congress candidate in the presidential election.