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Nepal has survived things that would have broken many countries going through similar situations. A decade-long armed conflict, two devastating earthquakes, frequent political protests, seven constitutions in seventy-five years, dozens of governments that rose and fell before completing a single term, and yet the country persists—borders intact (more or less), democracy functioning if imperfectly, institutions battered but breathing.

This resilience is real and worth acknowledging. Nepal has been remarkably good at surviving. It has been considerably less good at thriving. The question worth asking, especially as a new political chapter opens with the RSP-led majoritarian government, is this: why has Nepal been unable to turn its resilience into genuine transformation? The answer is not complicated, but it is uncomfortable. Nepal has struggled to thrive not primarily because of its geography, or its neighbors, or the indifference of international donors. It has struggled because of its own politics and the historic regime changes could not deliver the promises.

The problem is closer to home than we pretend.

Look at where Nepal stands on the indices that matter. According to the recent Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, it ranks 109th out of 180 countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit classifies its democracy as a ‘hybrid regime’. No government since 1990 has completed a full five-year term. The average tenure of a Prime Minister has been under a year and a half. These are not statistics exclusively produced by geopolitics. They are largely produced by political elites who have treated governance as a bargaining chip rather than a public duty.

The consequences have been predictable. Citizens have lost confidence in state delivery of basic services. Young people, over 1,800 of them every single day, are leaving the country. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranks Nepal 131st out of 184 nations, classifying it as ‘mostly unfree’. Social inequality remains stark: Dalits, Janajatis, Madheshi communities, and women have been historically excluded from wealth and opportunity despite a constitution that promises otherwise.

This is the central tragedy of Nepal’s last few decades. The country completed a historically remarkable triple transition—from monarchy to republic, from Hindu state to secular state, from unitary to federal system—and then largely squandered the political goodwill and institutional energy that transition generated. The problem is not that the transformation happened. The problem is that it was left half-finished and elite-captured.

Democracy needs deeper roots

Political change in Nepal has repeatedly meant a change in faces rather than a change in systems. Parties have rotated through power. Coalitions have formed, collapsed, and re-formed. New political movements, including the RSP and independent candidates, have emerged with genuine public enthusiasm. But enthusiasm is not a governance system. The hard work of democratic consolidation such as building independent institutions, protecting press freedom, strengthening accountability mechanisms, expanding civic participation has lagged far behind the political drama.

This matters enormously because a democracy that exists only on paper cannot generate the moral authority a country needs to actually lead itself, let alone engage the world with confidence. The Economist Intelligence Unit places Nepal 98th on its global democracy index. According to Reporters Without Borders, its press freedom score, once the highest in South Asia, has declined in recent years. These are not minor footnotes. They are signals of a democracy that is, at best, stagnant.

Until domestic politics is genuinely reformed, and until democracy is deepened rather than just performed, leadership changes will not translate into different outcomes. The problem is not who sits in Singhadurbar. The problem is what kind of political culture surrounds whoever sits there.

A civic gap that nobody is filling

Equally important, and often overlooked, is the question of citizens. Nepal's social transition has created a curious paradox: rights consciousness has grown considerably in the recent decades, but civic responsibility has not kept pace. Rights discourse is strong; the culture of civic duty is weakening. Unionisation has advanced, but at times at the cost of civic engagement. Social media has amplified both information and misinformation. Young people are politically aware but institutionally alienated.

Nepal needs not just better politicians. It needs more critically engaged citizens who hold politicians accountable between elections and not just during them. The 2025 GenZ protests signalled something important: a generation that is deeply frustrated with the gap between what the constitution promised and what is actually delivered. That frustration is politically valuable only if it produces sustained civic participation rather than one-off street protests that fade without follow-through.

Foreign policy: Neither loudly sovereign nor quietly dependent

Nepal’s geopolitical position is one of the most discussed features of its situation, and also one of the most misunderstood. The country sits between India and China, two of the world’s most consequential powers, while also navigating pressure from the West on various occasions. The temptation, in such a situation, is to either double down on nationalist defiance or quietly accommodate whoever offers the best deal.

Both approaches are traps. Ultra-nationalist posturing has real costs. It closes off productive economic and development cooperation. It makes it harder to attract investment, build connectivity infrastructure, or engage in regional and global trade agreements. The strong nationalist sentiment that has helped Nepal resist outright capture has, when taken to an extreme, also prevented the country from seizing legitimate strategic opportunities.

On the other hand, excessive deference to any single power, whether India, China, or the West, erodes the sovereignty that gives small states their only real protection. Nepal has already experienced what happens when infrastructure built with one neighbour's investment struggles to function because of another neighbour's policies. Dependence is not neutrality; it is vulnerability with a friendlier name.

The real path forward is a balanced, sovereignty-oriented foreign policy built on something Nepal currently lacks but desperately needs: moral credibility. A Nepal that ranks higher on governance, lower on corruption, deeper on democracy, and more inclusive in its economic distribution is a Nepal that can engage India, China, and the West from a position of earned confidence rather than transactional dependency. Foreign policy strength begins at home.

The questions that cannot be avoided

Nepal's situation also raises harder, longer-range questions that politicians prefer to leave unanswered. Can a landlocked country build genuine economic sovereignty without trading away meaningful autonomy in the process? Can political stability be sustained without first achieving social stability and completing a genuine post-conflict reconciliation? As the global rule-based order weakens under great-power competition, what protections actually remain for small states that cannot offer military alliances or large markets?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are urgent ones. And the fact that Nepal has arrived at this political moment, with new leaders, renewed public energy, and real expectations, without clear answers to any of them suggests that the country may be about to repeat a familiar pattern: change at the top, stagnation underneath.

Survival was never the final goal

Nepal has earned its reputation for resilience. But a nation of thirty million people, sitting on enormous hydropower potential, possessing extraordinary cultural heritage, and home to a young population that is globally connected and politically awakened, deserves more than a reputation for surviving.

The test for this generation of leaders is whether they can move Nepal from a country that endures to a country that delivers. That means fixing domestic politics in a way that is structural and not cosmetic. It means deepening democracy beyond elections. It means cultivating civic culture as seriously as economic policy. And it means pursuing a foreign policy that is neither reflexively defiant nor quietly submissive, but grounded in the kind of governance and moral credibility that gives a small nation real standing in a competitive and turbulent world.

Nepal has always found a way to stand back up. The more important question now is whether it is ready to actually move forward.

The author is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA

Four years ago, the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) did not exist. Today, it is forming Nepal’s government. That alone should make every traditional political party stop and ask itself a very uncomfortable question: what went so wrong?

The March 5 election results were not merely a surprise. They were a rebuke, delivered quietly through the ballot box by millions of Nepalese voters who had run out of patience. RSP's landslide victory is historic not because a new party won, but because it signals something deeper: the collapse of public faith in the political establishment that has governed this country since the democratic revolution of 1990.

The weight of 35 years

To understand why RSP won, you have to understand what Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, and the Maoist Centre have come to represent in the minds of ordinary voters. These parties have had every opportunity. They have held power repeatedly. They have made promises repeatedly. And repeatedly, voters have watched corruption scandals unfold, unemployment persist, public services stay broken, and governments formed through deals that had nothing to do with governance and everything to do with political survival.

The Sept 2025 GenZ protests tried to force accountability through the streets. Young people came out in tens of thousands, angry and organized, demanding change. The response from the old guard was predictable: consolidate, maneuver, and wait for the storm to pass. Many of those same leaders tightened their grip on their party structures and assumed they would outlast the anger.

They misread the room. When the protest could not dislodge them, voters took matters into their own hands on election day. Quietly, and in massive numbers, they chose someone else.

The Balen factor

RSP’s strategic decision to align with Kathmandu’s popular mayor, Balen Shah, and present him as the incoming Prime Minister just weeks before the election was arguably the most consequential political move of this election cycle. It gave RSP something it badly needed: a face, a story, and a reason to vote.

Balen ran a campaign unlike anything Nepal had seen before. He traveled the country in a caravan-style tour, appearing in constituency after constituency, not as a party boss but as something closer to a movement. His interactions with the media remained minimal. His public statements were carefully measured. Yet none of that seemed to matter. What voters saw was someone different. Someone who had actually done something as Kathmandu’s mayor, and who carried himself with a quiet credibility that felt foreign in a political landscape dominated by familiar faces making familiar promises.

This is important to understand: many voters who cast a ballot for RSP could not name their local RSP candidate. Many had only a vague sense of the party’s actual policy platform. What they knew was Balen, and what Balen represented—the possibility, however uncertain, that things could be done differently. In a country exhausted by broken promises, that possibility was enough.

History has a pattern

Nepal’s political history follows a recognizable rhythm. The party that captures the energy of a major political turning point tends to win the election that follows. Nepali Congress led the government after the 1990 democratic movement. The Maoists swept to power after the peace process ended the decade-long armed conflict. Madhes-based parties rose in 2008 on the back of a powerful identity movement. UML and the Maoists dominated in 2017 after steering the promulgation of the new federal constitution.

RSP has now repeated this pattern. Whatever one thinks of the GenZ protests, RSP absorbed their energy and their symbolism. They carried the sentiment of that movement into the election. And history, as it tends to do, rewarded them for it.

The harder question

But winning is the easy part. Governing is not. RSP now inherits a country with a fractured economy, deeply entrenched patronage networks, a public service in disrepair, and a geopolitical position that requires careful navigation between India, China and the West. The very expectations that swept RSP to power are now its greatest liability. Voters did not just want RSP to win. They wanted someone to actually fix things. The mandate is real, but so is the weight of it.

Several questions will define RSP’s tenure before it even properly begins. Can the party hold together its internal dynamics—particularly the relationship between the party leadership and whoever leads the government—without fracturing under the pressure of real decisions? Will it have the discipline to focus on long-term governance rather than the temptation of short-term popularity through high-profile corruption investigations? And perhaps most critically: will it fall into the same patterns of compromise politics that eroded the credibility of every government before it?

There is also the question of capacity. RSP is a four-year-old party. It does not have the deep bench of experienced administrators and policymakers that comes with decades in politics. This is, in some ways, part of its appeal. But governing a country is not the same as campaigning through one. The distance between the promise of change and the delivery of it has destroyed many political careers in Nepal. RSP is about to find out how wide that distance really is.

A verdict, not a blank cheque

The March 5 result deserves to be read for what it is: a verdict on the past, and a conditional bet on the future. Voters did not give RSP unconditional trust. They gave it a chance and it is a rare, hard-won chance born out of collective frustration and a willingness to try something new. That is not the same as loyalty, and RSP would be wise not to confuse the two.

Nepal’s old parties will not disappear. They will regroup, recalibrate, and wait. If RSP stumbles—if governance fails, if corruption appears, if the internal politics become more visible than the public service—those parties will be ready to remind voters that the alternative they chose was no better than what came before.

The GenZ generation that lit the fuse of this political moment is watching. So is the far larger group of ordinary Nepalis who quietly voted for change without quite knowing what form it would take. They have done their part. The ballot box has spoken.

Now comes the harder work, and the real test of whether this is truly a new chapter in Nepal's politics, or just another turn of the same old wheel.

Nepal is days away from electing a new House of Representatives on March 5. This is an election born out of one of the most dramatic political upheavals the country has witnessed in recent time. The GenZ protests of Sept 8–9, shook the foundations of the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML-led coalition government, forced the dissolution of Parliament, and propelled former Chief Justice Sushila Karki into the role of interim Prime Minister. In many ways, this election carries the weight of a nation’s renewed hope to bring the constitutional processes on track. 

And yet, something is quietly poisoning that hope—not a foreign enemy, not a natural disaster, but something far more insidious: a flood of propaganda that is dividing Nepalese society in ways that may take years to repair.

This is not the first election Nepal has held in the wake of political transformation. But it may be the first where the election campaign itself has become more dangerous than the political crisis that preceded it. Across social media feeds, public rallies, and private conversations, Nepali citizens and political cadres are not debating policy, rather they are choosing sides in a war of narratives. And the longer this goes on unchecked, the harder it will be to put the country back together once the votes are counted.

A campaign built on slogans

Walk through the current election campaign landscape and one phrase captures the spirit of it all: ‘Desh banaune ra desh jalaune’—those who will build the country and those who will burn it. It sounds dramatic. It is meant to. And therein lies the problem. Nearly every major political force, either old or new, has reduced the complexity of Nepal’s governance challenges into a simple binary: us versus them, nationalists versus traitors, reformers versus the corrupt establishment. Nepali Congress, reinvigorated under Gagan Thapa following a special party convention, presents itself as a fresh political alternative. 

The newly formed Nepali Communist Party (NCP), which brought together nearly a dozen leftist factions after the September protests, also claims to represent a new dawn. The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), with Balen Shah now formally in its ranks and declared as their prime ministerial candidate, pitches itself as the true outsider ready to dismantle the old order. Meanwhile, CPN (UML) under KP Sharma Oli, who led the government during the protests that triggered this election, is somehow also claiming the nationalist high ground.

The problem is not that parties are presenting themselves favorably. Every political party in every democracy does that. The problem is that these competing narratives have little to do with actual governance proposals. Manifestoes promise extraordinary things: CPN (UML) pledges one million youth jobs in five years. RSP commits to per capita income crossing $3,000 USD. Others promise to slash corruption overnight and send corrupt leaders to jail, without specifying a single credible legal mechanism for doing so. These are not policy platforms. They are propaganda dressed in the language of policy.

Old wounds reopened, new fractures created

Perhaps the most telling sign of how propaganda-driven this election campaign has become is the return of debates that most people assumed were settled by the 2015 Constitution. The monarchy question, which was resolved when Nepal became a federal democratic republic, is somehow back on the table. The Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) has made monarchy restoration a central demand, positioning itself as the only truly nationalist force, implying that everyone else is, to varying degrees, compromised by foreign interests and imposing foreign agenda.

The “who is a nationalist” debate has spread like wildfire. CPN (UML), despite bearing significant political responsibility for what happened during the Sept 2025 protests, now presents itself as a bulwark against foreign interference. RSP’s candidate Sobita Gautam and others were labeled “American agents” on social media—a claim later fact-checked and found to be based on a deliberately misleading photograph. Manipulated AI-generated images of Gagan Thapa being chased by crowds were widely circulated before being debunked. According to Nepal Fact Check, such incidents are not isolated—they reflect a systematic effort to use digital tools to shape perception rather than inform it.

A recent survey by the Center for Media Research Nepal found that over 95 percent of online users in Nepal had encountered false information at some point. With 73 percent of Nepalis now using smartphones and over 37 percent having internet access according to the 2021 National Census, the infrastructure for mass misinformation has never been more complete.

Beyond the monarchy-versus-federalism divide, the Sept 8–9 protests themselves have become a battleground of competing narratives. Sept 8, when security forces killed protesters in the streets, is remembered by some as a day of martyrdom and used by RPP as evidence of state brutality under the then-ruling coalition. Sept 9, when mobs destroyed public and private property, is the image CPN (UML) prefers to amplify, using it to question the legitimacy of the entire protest movement—while staying conspicuously silent about the bloodshed the day before. Nepali Congress and the Nepali Communist Party have taken a more measured position, acknowledging the protests and calling for an independent investigation into both days. But measured voices struggle to compete in an environment where outrage is the currency of engagement.

The invisible global agenda

One of the quieter failures of this election campaign is the near-complete absence of serious debate on the issues that will most shape Nepal’s future over the next decade. Climate change, which threatens Nepal’s glaciers and water security. The restructuring of the global economy, which directly affects remittances—currently surging by over 32 percent and sustaining a foreign reserve of $22.47bn, but fragile nonetheless. 

Youth unemployment and economic inequalities, which were the original fuel behind the GenZ protests. These are the issues that demand substantive policy discussion. Instead, what voters are getting feels less like a parliamentary election and more like a local government campaign—personal, parochial, and driven by personality over platform.

Meanwhile, some leaders, including deposed King Gyanendra, have stated that Nepal’s very existence as a sovereign nation is in question, that the country is ‘close to a major accident’. These are extraordinarily alarming things to say, and they are being said without a shred of evidence. When leaders speak this way without backing, they are not sounding alarm bells, rather they are manufacturing fear. And manufactured fear is one of the oldest and most effective propaganda tools known to politics.

What happens the morning after

When the results come in the following week of March 5, one side will have won and several will have lost. But the deeper question is: what kind of country will Nepal be when the campaign posters come down?

Polarization of the kind being manufactured right now does not disappear after election day. It settles into communities, strains friendships, fractures families, and hardens into the kind of social division that festers for years. None of the current political forces, neither the so-called new ones nor the established ones, seem interested in stepping back from the propaganda machine. Because, simply put, it works. At least in the short term.

This is precisely why the responsibility now falls on those who stand outside the electoral arena: civil society, independent media, academic institutions, and think tanks. Nepal urgently needs serious investment in propaganda fact-checking, not as a reactive exercise after falsehoods have gone viral, but as a proactive, institutionalized function embedded in the election cycle. Organizations like Nepal Fact Check are doing valuable work, but they cannot carry this alone. Tech platforms operating in Nepal, the Election Commission of Nepal, and policy bodies need to come together to build the infrastructure like technical tools, regulatory guidelines, and public literacy programs that can hold propaganda accountable in real time.

There is also a deeper structural issue. Many of the propaganda narratives that have taken hold during this election campaign—about the September protests, about foreign interference, about the monarchy, about federalism—thrive precisely because there has been no credible, independent, evidence-based account of these events that the public can trust. When authoritative information is absent, rumor and spin fill the vacuum. 

Nepal needs white papers from concerned authorities, investigative reporting from independent media, policy briefs from research institutions, and reels and TikTok videos from ethical content creators that can put facts on the table with enough credibility and reach to shift the public conversation. The question, honestly, is whether Nepal has yet built the institutional capacity to do this. If not, that capacity needs to become a priority after this election, regardless of who wins.

A paradigm shift Nepal cannot afford to delay

Nepal has come a long way from a decade-long armed conflict to a constitutional republic with federal democratic governance. That journey was not easy, and it was not free. Thousands of lives and decades of struggle went into building the political framework that now exists. To watch that framework hollowed out by propaganda, not by armed insurgents, but by politicians with microphones and social media accounts, should concern every Nepali citizen deeply.

The March 5 election will happen. A government will be formed. But the work of preventing propaganda from becoming the permanent language of Nepali politics must begin the moment the voting ends. Civil society must speak louder. Journalists must hold the line. Citizens must demand more from their leaders than clever slogans and manufactured fear. Because a country that chooses its leaders based on who tells the most convincing lies is not choosing its future—it is surrendering it.

The author currently serves as a Visiting Research Fellow at Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA. The author writes on political affairs, peace, governance, and social policy in Nepal