From outsider to front-runner: how Balen and Gen Z shook Nepal’s politics

New Delhi/Kathmandu, March 18 (IANS): While the Gen-Z movement has emerged worldwide, Nepal is the only country to bring about swift political transformation. Nepal's recent election results have defied expectation, leaving observers questioning whether they underestimated the wave of Balendra Shah, with his party, Rashtriya Swatantra Party (RSP) - having entered the country’s political arena only in 2022 - winning close to a two-thirds majority, a report said on Wednesday.

“Since the advent of democracy in 2008, it has been the traditional parties — Nepali Congress, Maoist Centre (now Nepali Communist Party or CNP), and the Communist Party of Nepal-UML (or CPN-UML) — and their respective leaders, Sher Bahadur Deuba, Pushpa Kamal Dahal (alias Prachanda), and K P Sharma Oli, who have dominated Nepal’s political landscape for decades," a report in India Narrative detailed.

“Balendra Shah, popularly known as Balen, an engineer and rapper, entered politics in 2022 by running for the Kathmandu mayoral race and won as an independent candidate, defeating stalwarts from different parties. But with just three years of experience as an administrator and politician, no family lineage in politics, and no party backup, he became the prime ministerial candidate of a party he joined just two months before the elections and made history by winning such a huge mandate and being in line to be the youngest Prime Minister in Nepal’s electoral history,” it added.

According to the report, in a country shaped by “strong regional loyalties, ethnicities, and religious communities”, such a mandate demonstrates how well-crafted policies could “dismantle the divides and unite the electorate around issue-based politics”.

This marked, it said, a historical mandate, as in the past, no party has won an outright majority, and the coalition governments have often led to instability and frequent changes of the Prime Minister in Nepal.

“This will also be the first time that parties in the opposition will have no choice but to sit in the opposition, and the room for midway bargaining to form governments will vanish. The compulsion of coalitions will also no longer be part of the policy-making process and will no longer enforce biases and interests in national development planning,” it noted.

The report further said, “Nepal’s movement and election outcomes are also closely watched by countries of the subcontinent, as the rising gap between youth and traditional leadership and parties makes a best case for change. While countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have already witnessed it, countries like Pakistan and the Maldives could be the next in line.”

—

This report was published from a syndicated wire feed. Apart from the headline, the EdexLive Desk has not edited the copy.