Balen Shah's RSP sweeps Nepal polls, winning 125 of 165 seats under FPTP
Kathmandu, March 9 : As counting of votes concluded in 163 electoral constituencies out of 165 under the First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system in Nepal’s parliamentary elections by Monday evening, the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) secured nearly 76 per cent of the seats in the House of Representatives in a sweeping electoral victory.
The three-and-a-half-year-old party, led by its President Rabi Lamichhane and Prime Ministerial candidate Balen Shah, secured victory in 125 seats, as one heavyweight leader after another from traditional political parties — including former Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli — fell before the RSP wave sweeping the country.
In one of the remaining seats, Arjun Kumar Karki, a candidate from the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) (CPN-UML), is leading against RSP candidate Mingma Sherpa. There is also a legal dispute over the election in Dhanusa-1 constituency in Madhes province, after the RSP candidate was disqualified by the Election Commission of Nepal for being blacklisted by the Credit Information Bureau of Nepal.
Shah, the former Mayor of Kathmandu Metropolitan City, secured victory against Oli with 68,348 votes — the largest vote tally by any candidate in Nepal’s parliamentary history — from Jhapa-5 constituency in eastern Nepal, which had long been considered Oli’s stronghold.
As the RSP is also leading under the proportional representation electoral system with over 48 per cent of the vote share by Monday evening, and if the trend continues, the party is likely to secure close to a two-thirds majority — around 184 seats — in the 275-member House of Representatives, the lower house of Parliament.
No single political party since the 1991 elections has secured a two-thirds majority in the lower house. When two communist forces — the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) and the erstwhile Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) — forged an electoral alliance for the 2017 parliamentary elections, they secured close to a two-thirds majority.
After the two parties briefly merged in 2018 to form the Nepal Communist Party (NCP), the unified communist government enjoyed near two-thirds strength before the alliance collapsed due to personality clashes between the then co-chairpersons — K P Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as ‘Prachanda’.
Earlier, in Nepal’s first democratic elections in 1959, the Nepali Congress secured a two-thirds majority by winning 74 out of 109 seats. However, an RSP victory with potentially two-thirds of the seats would be even more remarkable because it is difficult to secure even a simple majority when 40 percent of the seats in the House are filled through the proportional representation system. The RSP appears to have achieved that difficult feat. People’s verdict appears clear.
“The people’s verdict reflects the anger against established political parties for their misrule, as we have seen state institutions being heavily filled with individuals close to political parties instead of competent professionals,” Rajendra Maharjan, a political analyst, told IANS.
“We witnessed such misrule during the Panchayat system in Nepal before 1990, when the King’s authority was supreme, and even during the democratic period,” he added.
Analysts say the Gen-Z protests in Nepal 2025 in September last year, which brought down the coalition government led by K P Sharma Oli, had already served as a warning sign that people were increasingly angry with the traditional political parties.
“The writing on the wall was already there, but the leadership of traditional political parties continued with their arrogance and failed to pursue leadership changes,” Maharjan said.
After the Gen-Z movement, Oli further consolidated his power within his party through his party’s general convention, while former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba tried to prevent the special general convention that eventually brought Gagan Thapa to the leadership of the Nepali Congress in January.
Thapa, who had been named the Prime Ministerial candidate of the party, suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of Amaresh Kumar Singh, an RSP candidate, in Sarlahi-4 constituency in Madhesh Province.
“When Thapa was elected president through the special general convention in January and launched the election campaign, it had already become too late to change people’s minds,” said Arun Subedi, another political analyst and former foreign policy advisor to Deuba when he was Prime Minister in 2022. “This leadership change failed to withstand the anti-incumbency sentiment among voters.”
The Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, and the erstwhile CPN (Maoist Centre) have ruled the country alternately for the last two decades.
Their respective leaders — Sher Bahadur Deuba, K P Sharma Oli, and Pushpa Kamal Dahal — have remained at the helm of power for nearly a decade.
“Besides the anti-incumbency factor, economic and foreign policy failures of the leadership of established political parties helped new forces rise,” Subedi said.
With the economy underperforming for years, job creation has remained weak, while a large number of young people have been leaving the country in search of foreign employment. The old political guard is widely blamed for this situation.
“On the other hand, the democratic world was also seeking the emergence of an alternative democratic force in Nepal, given the foreign policy failures of established political parties,” Subedi said, hinting at the potential influence of Western democracies. “A combination of these factors contributed to the rise of a new political force sweeping all before it,” he said.