Bagmati Chief Minister Bahadur Singh Lama won the confidence of the provincial assembly on Tuesday.

A total of 64 provincial assembly members stood in support of the trust motion tabled by the chief minister, which is a majority of present members, announced Speaker Bhuwan Pathak.

A total of 35 votes were cast against the motion while three members stayed neutral.

While the lawmakers from the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML voted for the motion, the members from the CPN (Maoist Centre), the CPN (Unified Socialist), Rastriya Prajatantra Party and the Hamro Nepali Party voted against it. The members representing the Nepal Workers and Peasants Party remained neutral.

This is the fourth time the province MPs took part in the vote of confidence motion in 19 months.

Lama was appointed as the chief minister by province head Yadav Chandra Sharma on July 23 after he laid claim to the post with the support of 64 members of the 110-seat provincial assembly.

He is the fifth chief minister of the province since the formation of the provincial governments in 2017. Lama, who was appointed to the top post of the province government on July 23, leads the Congress-UML alliance in the province.

Shalikram Jamkattel, the Maoist Centre leader tendered his resignation, on July 21, as his government slipped into the minority with the formation of a federal coalition between the Congress and the UML. Earlier, he had taken a vote of confidence three times during his tenure since he first became chief minister on February 9, 2023.

UML’s Dormani Poudel was the first chief minister of the province after the 2017 federal and provincial polls and then another UML leader Asta Laxmi Shakya took charge for a brief period before Unified Socialist’s Rajendra Pande took over the helm following the split in the then Nepal Communist Party.