- Nepal holds its first general election since last year's Gen Z-led uprising against the government
- Balendra Shah, former rapper and Kathmandu mayor, leads young candidates with reform agenda
- Main opponents include Gagan Kumar Thapa of Nepali Congress and ex-PM KP Sharma Oli
Nepal kicks off its first general election since a Gen Z-led uprising that ousted the former government last year, with a new crop of young candidates emerging to challenge the old guard's grip on power in the Himalayan nation.
Balendra Shah, a 35-year-old former rapper-turned-politician who was previously the mayor of the capital Kathmandu, has emerged as a front-runner with backing from many of the young voters behind last year's revolt. His party, the three-year-old Rastriya Swatantra Party, is supporting a corruption-busting platform of economic reform, channeling the grievances that animated the youth movement.
In an interview, RSP Co-General Secretary Bipin Acharya said the election was a turning point for the country to usher in change. "Our focus will primarily be on two elements - economic and changes to the bureaucratic system," Acharya said.
Shah's main opponents are leaders from a handful of older parties, including Gagan Kumar Thapa, president of the centrist Nepali Congress, and KP Sharma Oli, the 74-year-old ex-prime minister who was ousted during last year's upheaval.
Thapa is campaigning on economic reform, becoming party leader after an internal fracture following the protests. Oli's Communist Party of Nepal is pushing a platform of expanded social welfare schemes to address the economic concerns that helped fuel the protests.
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Thursday's election comes just six months after deadly protests swept the nation, prompted by a ban on social media sites that eventually snowballed into nationwide convulsions against unemployment, corruption and inequality. Police eventually opened fire on demonstrators in Kathmandu, leading protesters to torch government buildings, smash through police barricades and storm the country's parliament. Within days, Oli had resigned, at least 70 people were dead and an interim government took over to oversee rebuilding and fresh elections.
The poll is expected to serve as a litmus test for Nepal, the narrow Himalayan nation nestled between India and China, whose politics have been under near-constant churn since it abolished its monarchy and became a democratic republic almost two decades ago.
One of the poorest nations in the region, nearly one in five people in Nepal under the age of 24 live overseas and a quarter of the country's gross domestic product comes from remittances. One of the country's largest industries, tourism, has been squeezed in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic.
"The protests forced some sort of a reckoning on all the major political parties in terms of understanding the importance of how the country's younger generation perceive the way they are governing," said Shivam Shekhawat, a fellow at New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation. "If the new leadership fails to take tough decision with regards to how the country functions, there is a possibility of the old status quo coming back."
Nepal has held four elections since 2008, with almost 10 prime ministers in between and has frequently oscillated between Asia's superpowers China and India, for investments.
The vote is also expected to serve as a referendum on the Gen-Z movement, which is hoping to transform the momentum of last year's protests into lasting institutional change. Such movements have run into problems translating their street power to the ballot box: Last month's elections in Bangladesh swept back into power a decades-old mainstream party, leaving the student movement that toppled former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2024 fractured and in disarray.
"The next government in the parliament needs to take the voice that was raised on the streets and change it into policy and law," Sasmit Pokharel, a candidate from RSP contesting in Kathmandu, said in an interview.
In Nepal's parliamentary system, 165 lawmakers are elected by the first-past-the-post method and another 110 are elected through a closed list representation system. Though a coalition government could be a likely outcome - a full majority government has been rare in the past - such a government could put economic and social reforms at risk, Shekhawat said.
"The endemic issues plaguing the country like corruption and lack of employment in productive sectors and the increasing migration of young people outside Nepal, all require fresh thinking and approach," she said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
