The Pulse | Politics | South Asia

A Year After Nepal’s Gen Z Uprising, Balendra Shah Confronts the Limits of Revolt

Its leaders successfully dismantled an old political order but had little knowledge of how to develop the institutions or governing consensus needed to replace it.

Nepal’s Gen Z protesters in front of a government office building at Bharatpur, Nepal, September 9, 2025.

It has been a year since Nepal’s 2025 Gen Z uprising. It was spontaneous. No one could have predicted that a youth-led protest whose demands centered on good governance and reversal of a social media ban would turn so deadly, resulting in 76 deaths. Within two days, the old political establishment had been swept aside, leaving the country in a political vacuum.

The then prime minister, KP Sharma Oli, had to literally run for his life. The uprising brought to the fore its own set of leaders. They were young, ambitious, and passionate, and untested politically — and this lack of political experience shows one year later.

The movement proved remarkably successful at dismantling an old political order and clearing the path for a new one. But it had been conceived as a limited protest of the disaffected youth, not as a blueprint for governing Nepal after the old order broke down.

The post-uprising period can be seen in two parts. In the first part, following the overthrow of the Oli government, former Chief Justice Sushila Karki was appointed prime minister after Gen Z leaders picked her through a vote on the messaging app, Discord. She was given the sole mandate of holding elections within six months.

The government faced formidable obstacles. Traditional political forces initially refused to participate in the electoral process as they doubted the elections would be free and fair. Meanwhile, the monarchists were getting vocal, seeking a place for the deposed king in the new setup. Many vital state institutions had been burned to the ground.

Yet the Karki government was ultimately able to take traditional political forces like the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist Leninist into confidence to create an environment for elections, and when elections eventually happened in March 2026, they were largely free and fair. Had the government failed to hold timely elections, the country could have plunged into a grave political and constitutional crisis.

In the second post-uprising phase, Balendra Shah came to power as a powerful prime minister, commanding nearly a two-thirds parliamentary majority in the March elections.

His five months in office have been turbulent. While Karki was only expected to manage immediate concerns and hold elections, expectations for the Shah government were far higher, and its delivery has been mixed.

One of its most urgent political tasks was to provide justice to the families whose members were killed during the Gen Z uprising. This entailed bringing the........

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