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A Sweeping Victory for Gen Z in Nepal—but Not Yet a “Revolution”

Nepal’s “Gen Z revolution” achieved historic and unexpected electoral success—but transformational change remains elusive.

Nepali Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) prime ministerial candidate Balendra Shah waves to supporters during a campaign roadshow in the district of Jhapa on March 1, 2026, in Bidhabare, Nepal.

Kathmandu—Last week, on the afternoon before Nepal’s special elections called by interim Prime Minister Sushila Karki after September’s “Gen Z” uprising, I walked across Kathmandu from the Swayambhu neighborhood on the city’s northwest side to the burned-out parliament building in the New Baneshwor quarter to the southeast. Along the way I passed the Singha Durbar palace complex, home to the prime minister’s and cabinet ministers’ offices, its main building under reconstruction after September’s arson, an armored vehicle parked inside the imposing gates. Not far down the street was the still fire-scarred Supreme Court.

When I reached the sprawling modern parliament complex along the wide boulevard called Madan Bhandari Road, I met a young man keeping vigil on the sidewalk in front of a makeshift memorial shrine. Taped to the main gate were photos of the 19 young protesters that security forces shot dead outside Parliament on September 8. Their deaths set off a nationwide conflagration—in all, 77 people died in the chaos of September 8 and 9—which resulted in the resignation of 74-year-old, three-time prime minister K.P. Sharma Oli and the dissolution of Parliament, and ushered in a new political era for this struggling nation of 30 million.

“The people inside that building didn’t care about us,” the young man, an earnest, 27-year-old Tribhuvan University graduate student, told me. “The government didn’t care about the people, they only cared about their own wealth and power, their own authority.”

He showed me where a bullet had grazed the back of his neck on September 8, holding up a photo on his phone so that I could see what the fresh wound had looked like. “I am lucky to be alive. It’s like I was given a new start to my life, a new chance.”

So, too, his country. On March 5, Nepali voters swept the three major legacy parties out of power, handing a parliamentary supermajority to the upstart, Gen Z-favored Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) and its wildly popular, populist PM candidate, Balendra “Balen” Shah, a 35-year-old engineer, former rapper, and, until recently, independent mayor of Kathmandu.

The significance of the sweep, what Nepali commentators are calling a “tsunami,” can hardly be overstated. It’s the first time in Nepal’s modern political history—which encompasses a democratic revolution in 1990, a bloody Maoist insurgency or “People’s War” from 1996 to 2006, a royal autocratic coup, and yet another revolution in 2006 that abolished the monarchy and established a federal democratic republic—that any party has won an outright majority, much less a supermajority. Indeed, some analysts assumed that Nepal’s electoral system, with its many parties and its combination of “first-past-the-post” and proportional representation, made such an outcome impossible. Apparently not. Decades of corrupt, ineffectual, revolving-door coalition governments—the country has seen 32 governments since 1990, none of them completing a full five-year term—may now come to an end.

And yet, it is not at all clear that September’s uprising and its resounding electoral ratification on March 5, amount to a Gen Z “revolution”—even if a simplistic international media narrative insists on calling it that. An uprising, a revolt, yes. A turning point in Nepal’s political history, quite possibly. Maybe even a transformational shift, if Gen Z activists and their civil-society allies can build and sustain a movement capable of bringing sufficient pressure to achieve their demands. But at this stage, it remains far from a revolution.

For one thing, the political system—and the pervasive political culture of corrupt impunity—remains intact. What Nepalis have done is to allow the constitutional process to work, so that genuine change, if it comes, will be an ongoing project. The revolution will have to be gradual—and even that is no sure thing.

The RSP and its incoming prime minister are hardly leftist radicals. They’re centrist, anti-corruption technocrats calling for effective, business-friendly governance. Their claims to a non-ideological “alternative politics”—together with Balen’s checkered human-rights record as Kathmandu mayor—don’t necessarily align with many Gen Z activists’ core values, which are ideologically of the left, emphasizing social justice and human rights for........

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