Finance Minister Surendra Pandey said the president had approved the ordinance adopting the budget. It does not require parliamentary passage.

The ruling parties and the main opposition Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) had earlier agreed to approve the budget in a parliamentary vote Friday.

However, the Maoists, who ended a decade-long insurgency in 2006, changed their minds at the last minute. Party lawmakers blocked Pandey, snatched his briefcase and hit him several times as he prepared to present the budget bill to Parliament.

Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal said the party was protesting the government’s attempt to present a full budget instead of another interim budget.

The dispute comes amid a political stalemate that has continued since Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and his government resigned in June under pressure from the Maoists, who hold the largest number of seats in parliament. Since then, parliament has tried repeatedly without success to elect a new prime minister.

Nepal and his Cabinet are running a caretaker administration, attending to little more than the most urgent functions of government. A budget was supposed to be approved by mid-July, and an interim budget expired this past week.

The new budget will enable the government to continue its administrative functions, pay workers, and fund public hospitals and schools. One-fourth of the 337 billion rupee ($4.7 billion) budget will be financed by foreign aid and loans.

Nepal’s political stalemate has set back progress on the peace process that ended the Maoists’ insurgency, which claimed thousands of lives. The Maoists are now in the political mainstream but the future of thousands of their former fighters whom they want enrolled in the national army remains unresolved.