Balendra Shah, known to most Nepalis simply as ‘Balen’ the rapper, has officially been elected to the country’s House of Representatives from the Jhapa-5 constituency with 68,348 votes — the highest vote total ever recorded in Nepal’s election history, surpassing the previous record set by the very man he defeated.
That man is Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, a four-time former prime minister and chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), who received just 18,734 votes in what had long been considered his political stronghold.
Till recently the mayor of Kathmandu, Balen Shah has led his centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) to a majority in the direct parliamentary elections, and it may even cross a landslide two-thirds share. The party had already won nearly 100 of the 165 directly elected seats and is leading in over a dozen more constituencies, as of Sunday afternoon, March 8.
The RSP delivered a clean sweep of all 15 parliamentary seats in the Kathmandu Valley. It is, by any measure, a rout.
Balen, a man of rap and records
Balen, 35, is obviously set to become Nepal’s next prime minister. If he does, he will be the youngest person to hold the position in Nepal’s parliamentary history.
More than 40% of Nepal’s nearly 30 million people are under 35, yet the leadership of its established parties has remained in its 70s. The mismatch had been building for years. In 2026, it broke open with a protest led by Gen-Z, unseating Oli as PM.
Balen Shah will also be the first Madhesi to hold the post, from an ethnic group in Nepal’s southern Terai plains who are roughly one-third of the population but have historically sought greater share in power. This community is linguistically and culturally spread across Nepal and India, speaking Maithili among other languages.
Balen, who is a structural engineer besides being a rapper, resigned as mayor of capital Kathmandu before resigning to contest the national elections. His rise is not accidental. He formally joined the RSP in December 2025, was declared its prime ministerial candidate, and chose to contest in Jhapa-5, directly challenging Oli in a seat the veteran leader had held in nearly every election since 2008. His campaign was modern and methodical. It relied on an extensive social media operation and significant funding from the Nepali diaspora.
His song ‘Nepal Haseko’ — Nepal Smiling — got more than 10 million YouTube views during last year’s protests. But it was his record as Kathmandu’s mayor, his language of accountability, and his refusal to align with established party machines that drove voters to him, according to analysts in The Kathmandu Post.
Gen-Z protest fueled rise
The elections came after the September 2025, Gen Z-led protests that demanded an end to corruption, nepotism and outdated leadership; and toppled PM Oli’s coalition government. At least 77 protesters, mostly students, died amid clashes with police.
Nepal’s Generation Z — a term used roughly for those born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s — had initially been triggered by a government attempt to ban social media platforms, but the protest quickly became something larger. They wanted a generational shift away from the entrenched lot.
President Ramchandra Paudel dissolved the parliament on September 12, and the Gen-Z groups chose Sushila Karki, a former chief justice, as caretaker prime minister. In the March 5 voting, the turnout was about 60%. Election officials described the process as largely peaceful.
How Nepal’s parliamentary system works
This was Nepal’s third parliamentary election since the promulgation of a constitution in 2015, which came seven years after monarchy was formally abolished.
Nepal currently follows a mixed electoral system. The lower house — the House of Representatives — has 275 members. Of these, 165 are elected through the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, where individual candidates contest specific constituencies. The remaining 110 are chosen through proportional representation (PR).
The FPTP element is straightforward; the candidate with the most votes wins the seat.
The PR system is more complex, and its allocation will be done as per total vote share. Under the proportional system, the entire country is treated as a single constituency, and all votes are pooled together. Parliamentary seats are then allocated to parties according to the percentage of votes they receive.
To qualify for proportional seats, a party must secure at least 3% of the total valid votes. Parties that fall below this threshold receive no seat, and their votes are excluded from the seat-allocation calculation entirely.
The Election Commission uses the Sainte-Laguë method, a widely used formula for vote division in proportional systems. Under this method, a party’s total votes are divided by a series of divisors (odd numbers 1,3,5 and so on), and seats are allocated based on the highest resulting values until all seats are filled.
Let’s do the math
Imagine five parties have qualified after winning at least 3% votes. And there are 10 seats to hand out. Imagine, Party A has 500,000 votes, Party B has 300,000, Party C has 200,000, and so on.
The Election Commission of Nepal lines them up and hands out seats one at a time.
- In Round 1, every party puts its full vote total on the table. Party A has the most, so it wins seat number one. But the moment it wins, its score gets divided by odd number divisor 3. So Party A’s number drops from 500,000 to 166,667.
- In Round 2, Party B still has its full 300,000 on the table. That is the highest number now, so it wins seat number two. Next, its votes are now divided by 3. It now has 100,000.
- In Round 3, Party C still has its full 200,000. That is the highest, so it wins seat number three. Its score is now divided by 3 for the next round; it drops to 66,667.
- In Round 4, Party A is back in the running with its 166,667. That beats everyone else, so it wins seat number four. It has now won two seats, so its total original votes (500,000) now get divided by the next odd number divisor 5; dropping to 100,000.
You can see the pattern. RSP started with a huge lead but keeps getting penalised every time it wins. The other parties, with undivided scores, keep getting their turn too. This means that vote share overall also means something for parties, even if they fail to get enough individual seats.
Also, the PR nominee lists submitted beforehand by the parties must reflect Nepal’s diverse population, with specified proportions for Dalits, Indigenous nationalities, Khas-Arya, Madheshi, Tharu, and Muslim communities, as per the constitution.
At least 33% of the total membership of the parliament must be women. If direct-election (FPTP) results fall short of that number, additional women are drawn from the parties’ PR lists to meet the requirement.
Democracy still finding its footing
Nepal was an absolute monarchy until a popular movement forced the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1990. A decade-long Maoist insurgency, which began in 1996, killed an estimated 17,000 people. The conflict ended in 2006 with a comprehensive peace agreement, and the monarchy was abolished two years later, when Nepal was declared a federal democratic republic.
The 2015 constitution is the country’s seventh. It established the current federal structure, with seven provinces and the mixed electoral system. It was the product of years of fraught negotiation and came just weeks after a catastrophic earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people.
Nepal has had 10 prime ministers since 2008, including Pushpa Kamal Dahal or ‘Prachanda’ (The Fierce One), the Maoist insurgency leader who has since been subsumed into politicking, analysts say.
The Communist -Maoist party has been divided; coalitions have formed and collapsed. Oli himself served multiple terms, returning to power each time through parliamentary manoeuvring rather than fresh mandates.
What has changed now is the mandate itself, according to political analyst Sunil Babu Pant. He told news agency PTI that the RSP’s victory “reflects the people’s deep-rooted frustration with the old political order and their hope for a new direction”.
RSP’s dominance of the direct vote, and resultantly smooth siling in the proportional vote, suggests Nepal is headed towards a single-party government for the first time in years. Whether Balen Shah can translate that mandate into stable governance is the question his country is now asking, said Pant.
