Rastriya Swatantra Party surges, leading in 47 Nepal seats.
Nepal election sees around 60% turnout amid excitement.
The tea stalls of Kathmandu were crowded on Friday morning, but the usual clamor of conversation had been replaced by something else—a hushed, electric focus on the radios crackling with updates. In a small shop near Ratna Park, an old man in a faded waistcoat turned up the volume, and a dozen heads leaned closer. The numbers were coming in. And they were unlike anything Nepal had seen before.
The Rastriya Swatantra Party—the “Independent Party” born barely four years ago—was sweeping the capital. Leading in 47 of 57 constituencies, the early counts suggested something profound: the young had not just protested. They had come to govern.
For Ranju Darshana, the morning began before dawn. At 29, heavily pregnant, she had spent the final weeks of the campaign walking the narrow alleys of Kathmandu-1, knocking on doors, speaking to women about why their voices mattered. When the news came that she had won—securing more than 10,000 votes, nearly double her nearest rival—she did not pump her fist or give a victory speech. She simply placed a hand on her belly and smiled.
Her journey here had been anything but simple. At 17, when most girls her age were thinking about college and friendships, Ranju joined the Bibeksheel Nepali Party, a small outfit that believed in clean politics. By 22, she was running for mayor of Kathmandu with a slogan that made people stop and smile: “Let’s make Kathmandu the most beautiful city in the world.” She lost that race. But she never stopped believing.
Now, in the final stretch of this campaign, she had walked until her feet swelled, until the doctors told her to rest, and then she walked some more. “It is about issues of half the population,” she had told reporters during the campaign. They had come out, many of them voting for the first time, to send a message that the future of Nepal would not be written by old men alone.
The rapper who became a mayor who could be prime minister
Across the city, in Jhapa-5, another story was unfolding. Balendra Shah—Balen to nearly everyone under 35—was locked in the most symbolic contest of the election. His opponent: KP Sharma Oli, the man who had been prime minister just six months ago, the man whose government had been brought down by the very young people now flocking to vote for a former rapper.
Balen had been an unusual mayor of Kathmandu. A structural engineer by training, he had approached potholes and garbage collection with the same methodical intensity he once brought to writing lyrics. When the Gen Z protests erupted in September 2025, he had stood with the demonstrators, not as a rabble-rouser, but as someone who understood that the system had failed a generation.
Now, as the early counts showed him leading in Jhapa-5, the tea shops buzzed with a new question: could a man with sunglasses and a rap career actually become prime minister? Parbat Basnet, a 24-year-old who had been on the front lines of the protests in Damak, had no doubt.
The ghosts of September
But for every moment of celebration, there was a shadow. Amrita Ban, 23, had been at the forefront of the protests that changed everything. On September 8, 2025, she had watched as security forces opened fire on demonstrators. A schoolboy had been killed that day. Seventy-seven people in total.
Now, standing near the burnt facade of a government building in Kathmandu—a scar the city still carried—she watched the election results with complicated feelings. “The agenda was to seek accountability, good governance, and against corruption. It is still on, and it’ll continue.”
She was not alone in this vigilance. Rajat Das Shreshtha, a well-known musician, put it simply: “Whichever government comes to power, Gen Z will be vigilant like a watchdog.” The young had learned that voting was not the end of democracy, but its beginning.
The long journey home
At Kathmandu’s Koteshwor Bus Park, the scene over the past two days had resembled a festival. More than 300,000 people had boarded buses headed for distant districts, determined to cast their votes where they were registered. Bidur Nepali, who ran a small business in the capital, had closed shop for two days to make the journey home. I would vote for that party which really can work for the good of the country.”
These journeys—long, uncomfortable, expensive—were a testament to something the political class had forgotten: people still believed, against all evidence, that their vote mattered.
A quiet revolution
By midday Friday, the dimensions of the change were becoming clear. The RSP had not just won Kathmandu; it was leading in Bhaktapur, in Lalitpur, in Morang and Dhanusha and Kaski. The old parties—Oli’s CPN-UML, the Nepali Congress, Prachanda’s communists—were being pushed to the margins in the capital they had dominated for decades.
For Ganesh Parajuli, winning Kathmandu-7, and Biraj Bhakta Shrestha, taking Kathmandu-8, the victories were personal. But they were also collective—the culmination of a journey that began with teenagers on social media venting about “nepo kids” with designer bags and ended with a fundamental redrawing of Nepal’s political map.
Interim Prime Minister Sushila Karki, who had stepped into the breach after Oli’s fall, becoming Nepal’s first woman to hold the office, had cast her vote early at Dhapasi. “My duty is completed,” she said simply. But her legacy would be measured in what came next.
The weight of expectation
As evening approached and the counting continued, a quiet settled over Kathmandu. Not the quiet of defeat, but the quiet of a city holding its breath. The young had won. But winning elections, as the old parties had proven again and again, was easier than governing well.
In her home, Ranju Darshana finally sat down, her feet elevated, a cup of tea growing cold beside her. The phone kept ringing—well-wishers, party workers, journalists—but for a moment, she let it ring. She thought about the girls who had come to her rallies, the ones who asked if they could ever be more than wives and mothers. She thought about the baby kicking inside her, who would grow up in a Nepal very different from the one she had known.
In Jhapa, Balen Shah watched the numbers climb and thought about the weight of what was coming. Not just a seat in parliament, but the hopes of a generation that had buried its friends, that had faced bullets, that had refused to accept that corruption and dynasty were simply how things worked.
The tea stalls would stay open late tonight, the conversations spilling into the streets. The numbers would keep coming. And in the morning, Nepal would wake to a new reality: the young had arrived. Now the real work began.