After Nepal’s Gen Z uprising, the country’s communists face a crisis of relevance

Does the result of Nepal’s general election announced on March 12 mark the beginning of the end for its communists?

Until the Gen Z revolution in September, the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist and Communist Party of Nepal had 120 seats in the 275-member house. The CPN-UML ruled in a coalition with the centre-right Nepali Congress. Communist parties have been in almost all the governments for the past two decades, functioning as steady stakeholders in state power.

But in the election held on March 5, the communists won only 42 seats.

Even the Nepali Congress has been ideologically supplanted by another liberal party, the Rastriya Swatantra Party. It won 182 seats, just short of a two-thirds majority. Its 36-year-old leader Balen Shah is set to become the prime minister.

The communists face a huge ideological crisis. They simply do not have a platform to rally citizens around.

Their failures contributed to the emergence of Balendra Shah, popularly known as Balen, a rapper and structural engineer in his 30s, who is now on the way to become the prime minister of Nepal. To Nepali voters, Balen stood out because he is much younger than the septuagenarian politicians of the old parties. He is also not implicated in any corruption scandals.

Rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah, better known...

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