What happened
Voters in Nepal have handed a landslide victory to the recently formed Rastriya Swatantra (RSP), or National Independent Party, putting former rapper and Kathmandu Mayor Balendra Shah on track to be prime minister, according to partial results released Sunday.
The election, held Thursday, was the first since youth-led protests toppled the Himalayan country’s previous government last year. Shah, 36, also unseated the ousted prime minister, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, in the 74-year-old’s longtime stronghold.
Who said what
Shah’s RSP party “crushed Nepal’s old guard,” winning at least 124 of 165 directly elected seats in the lower house of Parliament and 58 of the 110 seats allocated through proportional representation, the BBC said. The “landslide victory shows that the issues raised by Gen Z in last year’s protests — corruption, inequality and a revolving door of elite rules — has resonated across generations.” The election “took place while the wounds of the protests, which left nearly 80 people dead, were still fresh,” The Wall Street Journal said. Many Nepalese are hopeful that Shah, a civil engineer widely known as Balen, “could extend the success he had as mayor of Kathmandu to the rest of the country.”
The RSP “has marketed itself as technocratic and digitally fluent,” The New York Times said. The “average age of its candidates is decades younger than those of the big three parties” that have “controlled Nepali politics” for years.
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What next?
Full election results are expected later this week. Changing Nepal “will require support from members of the National Assembly,” the Times said. The RSP “does not have a single seat” in that separately elected upper house, so “to succeed, the RSP will have to engage in the kind of deal-making” for which Shah “has so far shown sneering distaste.”
