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START WITH what happened to the Nepali Congress in March. It is the oldest democratic party in Nepal, founded in 1947, the party of BP Koirala, who framed what democracy in Nepal could mean. In the 2022 general election, it won 89 seats and led the government. In recent elections, having watched the September 2025 protests burn parliament and sweep a generation into the streets, it won 38. The Communist Party of Nepal-UML, which had governed with Nepali Congress in the coalition that was overthrown, was reduced from a major force to 25 seats. The Nepali Communist Party, the third significant faction, won 17. Of the country’s once-dominant political establishment, nothing of consequence remained standing. Not a single Madhesh-based party won a seat.
The Rastriya Swatantra Party, which had not existed five years ago, now holds 182 of 275 parliamentary seats and runs the government alone. Balendra Shah, a former rapper who less than a year earlier was mayor of Kathmandu, is prime minister.
Nepal is not the first country where an anti-establishment wave has swept old parties off the stage. What happens next is usually one of two things. Either the old parties reform, become competitive again and democracy gets a functioning opposition; or they sink into factional infighting, the newcomers encounter the hard reality of governing and the entire system loses the competitive tension that makes democratic accountability possible.
Nepal is at the fork between those two outcomes, and the road it takes will be decided in the next few years by what the Nepali Congress, the UML and the RSP each choose to do with their new positions.
The Nepali Congress has taken the more promising early steps of the two old parties. In January it held a special general convention. Gagan Thapa—the party’s general secretary, a 49-year-old reformist who had been agitating for leadership change since the protests—won the party presidency with 56% of convention representatives. The Deuba faction, led by former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, resisted and challenged the result in court, but the Supreme Court confirmed Thapa’s legitimacy in April. The party that had been led for years by men in their seventies and eighties now has a president who came of age in the democratic era rather than before it.
This matters, except that it then came immediately undone. The March 5th election—held while the party was still split, its new leadership unconfirmed, its internal civil war demoralising—delivered a historic defeat. Thapa himself lost his own seat. The lesson some in the party drew was that the convention had been a mistake, a distraction.
The lesson Thapa drew, correctly, was the opposite: the convention was not the problem. The problem was that the party spent its time fighting over who should lead it rather than explaining to voters what it actually believed. “We must move away from the culture of writing manifestos and ignoring them once in power,” Thapa said at the convention. He was right.
Whether the party, now reorganising through a digital membership drive that had enrolled 175,000 members by late May, can act on that diagnosis before local elections determine whether the Congress is still a national force or a Kathmandu relic, is the most pressing test of the old establishment’s will to survive.
The CPN-UML’s situation is bleaker and its trajectory less clear. Its chair, K.P. Sharma Oli, was the prime minister who imposed the social media ban that sparked the September protests, the same ban that led to his resignation and the dissolution of parliament. He was re-elected party president before the March election anyway: a decision that told voters everything they needed to know about the party’s capacity for self-reflection.
He then lost his own seat to Balendra Shah in Jhapa-5 by more than three to one. He was subsequently arrested by the Shah government over the protest crackdown, held briefly and released when the courts questioned the legal basis. The UML is now led, nominally, by the man who caused the crisis it is trying to recover from, in a seat he no longer holds.
None of this means the old parties are finished, and understanding why they are not matters for anyone who cares about how Nepal’s democracy actually functions. Nepal’s upper house—the National Assembly—is elected by provincial assemblies, not by direct national vote, and it was swept in January by a Congress-UML alliance that won all but two available seats. Every bill the Shah government passes must clear both houses. The old parties, humiliated in the lower house, retain a role in the upper house that gives them real leverage. Any constitutional amendment—including the voting rights for overseas Nepalis that Shah has promised; or the restructuring of institutions the RSP wants—requires a two-thirds majority in both houses. The RSP holds 182 of 275 seats in the lower house, two short of two-thirds on its own and far from it in the upper house. It cannot govern by diktat.
This is not a bug in Nepal’s democratic design. It is the feature. A single party with near total power in the lower house, restrained by an upper house in which the parties it defeated retain representation, is the kind of tension that democracies build to prevent majorities from doing whatever they want. The risk, of course, is that the old parties use their upper-house position not to perform genuine legislative scrutiny but to obstruct and extract concessions they could not win at the ballot box.
The risk on the RSP’s side is different: that its own lawmakers, no longer on the opposition benches demanding accountability, stop doing the scrutiny that opposition once provided. The Kathmandu Post noted recently that RSP lawmakers “show no signs of holding their government to account”: that members who were vocal critics of the previous government have gone quiet now that their party is in charge.
That dynamic—an overwhelming majority governing without internal challenge, while the defeated opposition decides whether to reform or obstruct—is the exact condition under which democracies begin to die. The institutional checks that were built into Nepal’s 2015 constitution were designed for a more competitive parliament. They work less well when one party holds three-quarters of the seats.
What the old parties need to understand—and what the evidence suggests only the Congress, tentatively, has begun to grasp—is that the September 2025 generation did not reject democracy. It rejected the people who had been running it. The protesters who burned parliament buildings were young people who had watched the same faces cycle through prime ministerial offices for thirty-five years, who had grown up hearing about corruption as an abstract problem that none of their elected leaders seemed able or willing to name and address. They wanted accountability, competence and the basic services that a functioning state provides. They did not want the state abolished.
The NC under Thapa, the UML under whoever eventually replaces Oli and the smaller parties that might emerge from the wreckage of the Madhesi formations are all going to be necessary for Nepal’s democracy to function. Not because the old parties deserve to survive (they do not automatically deserve anything) but because a democracy without a credible opposition is not a democracy. It is a government that has removed the mechanism for changing course when it gets things wrong.
The RSP will get things wrong. Every government does. When that happens—when the ordinances exceed their mandate; when the budget disappoints; when the reform agenda stalls in the bureaucracy it is trying to reform—Nepal will need political parties capable of articulating what has failed and why, and offering a coherent alternative. Right now, it is not obvious that such parties exist.
Rebuilding them into something the generation that burned parliament might one day vote for is the boring, essential work of Nepali politics that nobody is doing publicly because everyone is still watching the new government. It needs to start. ■
