KATHMANDU: Nepal’s old political order collapsed on Friday as a Balen Shah-led wave powered Rastriya Swatantra Party to either win or establish substantial leads in at least 115 of 165 first-past-the-post (FPTP) seats, turning the parliamentary election after the Sept 2025 Gen Z uprising into a rout of the establishment.
Former PMs KP Sharma Oli and Madhav Kumar Nepal were staring at major upsets as results trickled in. Gagan Thapa of the Nepali Congress was trailing despite emerging as the party’s new face after ousting five-time PM Sher Bahadur Deuba to lead the organisation. Only Pushpa Kamal Dahal, or Prachanda, looked set to survive from the old guard. Even there, the verdict carried a sting: his daughter, Renu Dahal, was trailing in Chitwan.
With counting still under way in most FPTP seats and the 110 proportional representation seats yet to be tallied, a party or alliance needs 138 seats in the 275-member House to secure a majority. Final tallies were expected only by Saturday afternoon, but the direction of the result had already become unmistakable.
The sweep in the Kathmandu Valley was just as striking. In the capital and the adjoining suburbs of Lalitpur and Bhaktapur, RSP was leading in 14 of 15 seats, underlining how decisively the urban electorate had swung behind the new force.
If the trend holds, Balen, 35, is set to take over as PM, capping one of the sharpest generational shifts in Nepal’s recent political history. A former rapper and structural engineer who first built his public image through music and later as Kathmandu mayor, Balen became the face of the anti-establishment anger that exploded onto Nepal’s streets last Sept.
However, neither Balen nor party leader Rabi Lamichhane issued any statement, made any announcement, or posted on social media on Friday as the scale of RSP’s sweep became clear. Balen’s last public remark came after polling on Thursday, when he praised interim PM Sushila Karki and wrote: “Under your leadership, democracy has triumphed today.”
The rejection of those that the Gen Z protests targeted was stark. In Jhapa-5, Oli was trailing so badly that Balen had at least four times the former’s vote tally. Madhav Kumar Nepal, another veteran of Nepal’s coalition era, was also swept aside.
Prachanda appeared to have held his ground. But even that survival came wrapped in decline. Contesting yet again from a new constituency after shifting seats across elections, he looked less like a revived force than the last veteran left standing. His daughter’s struggle in Chitwan sharpened the message emerging elsewhere: old networks, family legacies and inherited political capital no longer guaranteed safety.
Baburam Bhattarai, the former PM who withdrew from Gorkha-2 at the last moment, had sensed early where the mood was heading. Explaining his exit in Jan, he said he would play “an advisory role beyond party politics” and continue supporting progressive and emerging forces from outside Parliament. He also said Nepal’s democracy would remain incomplete unless it created “dignified, productive jobs at home” and moved faster on economic change. Seen against Friday’s result, his withdrawal looked like an early recognition that the ground had shifted.
For many voters, Balen’s rise captured a double break — from the traditional parties and their political style. Born in Kathmandu, he grew up in a lower middle-class household; his father, Ram Narayan Shah, was a govt ayurveda practitioner and his mother, Dhruvadevi Shah, a homemaker. He studied civil engineering at Himalayan WhiteHouse International College in Putalisadak, Kathmandu, and later received an MTech in structural engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University in Karnataka, India.
Balen first entered national consciousness as a rapper whose songs took aim at corruption, political stagnation and inherited power. By this election he had acquired a rockstar-like popularity whose voice drowned everything and everyone else.
