Oli Arrested, the Left Routed: Nepal after the March 2026 Elections
Nepal’s parliamentary elections of 5 March 2026 produced a result without parallel since 1959: the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP, National Independent Party), a centrist populist formation, took 182 of the 275 seats and 47.8 per cent of the proportional vote, two seats short of a constitutional supermajority. The two principal parties of the Nepali left — the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) [CPN-UML] of K. P. Sharma Oli, and the Nepal Communist Party [NCP] of Prachanda — suffered their worst defeats in history, together holding under ten per cent of the seats. Oli was defeated in his own constituency by Balendra Shah. The centre-left Nepali Congress [NC] won just 38 seats.
Three weeks later, Oli and former Home Minister Ramesh Lekhak (NC) were arrested for criminal negligence over the repression of the September 2025 youth uprising, which killed 76 people and brought down the government. Released on conditions on 9 April by order of the Supreme Court, neither has yet been formally charged.
This sequence has reconfigured Nepal’s political order without lifting its contradictions. The new RSP government, carried to power by Gen Z, is constrained by an upper chamber it does not control, and its constitutional ambitions cannot be imposed unilaterally. The demand for accountability issued by the September movement sits in tension with questions of due process. The Nepali left, above all, faces a collapse that is not primarily electoral but ideological: twenty years of failure to translate into public policy the promises of transformation it had carried.
The verdict at the ballot box
The parliamentary elections of 5 March 2026, called early after the fall of the Oli government, confirmed at the ballot box what had been expressed in the street: a mass rejection of the old order. The RSP, an anti-establishment and nationalist movement, took 182 of the 275 seats in the House of Representatives — the strongest result for any Nepali political formation since the country’s first democratic elections in 1959.
The heaviest losers were the two main communist parties (ex-Maoist). Oli’s CPN-UML won just 13.4 per cent of the vote and 25 seats; Oli himself was defeated in his own constituency of Jhapa-5, a historic UML stronghold, by a margin of 49,614 votes (68,348 to 18,734) — the largest in the history of Nepali parliamentary elections. Prachanda’s NCP, formed by a November 2025 merger of several communist formations, took 7.5 per cent of the vote and 17 seats. The centre-left NC came second with 19.1 per cent and 38 seats — its president Gagan Thapa was among the defeated.
Two new formations broke through: Harka Sampang Rai’s Shram Sanskriti Party (SSP, Labour Culture Party), founded in the days following the uprising, took seven seats with 3.56 per cent of the vote — including all three seats in Koshi Province, taken from the CPN-UML in its historic eastern hill heartland; the monarchist and Hindu-nationalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP, National Democratic Party) took five seats with 3.05 per cent.
Nepal’s electoral system — The House of Representatives has 275 seats, elected under a mixed parallel system. 165 members are elected by first-past-the-post in single-member constituencies; 110 are elected by closed-list proportional representation on a single national constituency, with a 3 per cent threshold and seats allocated by the Sainte-Laguë method. PR lists must respect quotas for women (at least one third of each party’s elected members), Dalits, Janajatis (indigenous peoples), Madheshis, Tharus, Muslims and residents of remote regions. The National Assembly, the permanent 59-member upper house indirectly elected and renewed by thirds, was not up for renewal on 5 March; nor were the provincial assemblies.
The historic parties allowed themselves to be co-opted and corrupted after the end of the armed struggle in 2006. Since 2008, Nepal has had thirteen governments, with the same figures — Oli, Prachanda, Deuba — alternating in power without ever carrying through substantive reforms. [1] Federalism, promised to ethnic minorities, to the Madheshis of the southern plains and to indigenous peoples, remained a dead letter: since 2015, no government has transferred to the provinces the powers laid down in the Constitution, in particular control of the police and of provincial administrations. The Maoists, who had made federalism a banner of their armed struggle, actively contributed to hollowing it out once in government. [2]
This electoral verdict echoes a popular insurrection. Years of accumulated frustration — endemic corruption, nepotism, youth unemployment, absence of accountability — had reached breaking point. The viral NepoBabies campaign had publicly exposed the luxurious lifestyles of the children of the political elite, set against the plight of young Nepalis forced to emigrate for lack of prospects. It was in this context that, on 4 September 2025, the Oli government banned twenty-six social media platforms. That was the last straw. [3]
Without formal leadership, the movement organised via Discord after the official platforms were blocked. It triggered a violent explosion: public buildings and leaders’ residences set ablaze, at least 76 dead. [4] Police violence struck disproportionately at Dalits, Madheshis and working-class youth. Nepal thus became the third country in South Asia, after Sri Lanka (2022) and Bangladesh (2024), to see its government brought down by a youth movement. [5]
Shah, the RSP, and institutional constraints
Balendra Shah (Balen), 35, was appointed Prime Minister on 27 March 2026 — the youngest in Nepali parliamentary history. A rapper hugely popular among young people and disadvantaged communities, a structural engineer by training, he had broken through in 2022 by winning the mayoralty of Kathmandu as an independent candidate. A supporter of the September movement, he joined the RSP in January 2026 as its candidate for head of government.
The RSP programme contains significant commitments: constitutional amendments responding to some demands of the Madheshi and Janajati movements, reforms championed by Gen Z, transition to an executive directly elected by universal suffrage. These promises played a part in the victory; their implementation is far from assured. Shah is an avowed nationalist with no experience of negotiating with political interlocutors beyond the capital. His formation, centred on urban constituencies and educated youth, has shallow roots in rural communities, the Madheshi Terai or the indigenous peoples of peripheral regions. The RSP itself is traversed by a deep rivalry between Shah and the party president, Rabi Lamichhane, whose legal troubles — embezzlement of cooperative funds, citizenship questions — remain unresolved.
Above all, the RSP will not govern alone. The House of Representatives has been renewed, but not the National Assembly, where the NC and the CPN-UML together hold a two-thirds majority. Every piece of legislation must pass both chambers. The most ambitious constitutional reforms in the RSP programme — notably the shift to a directly elected executive — require a two-thirds majority in the lower house, which the RSP narrowly misses, and agreement with an upper chamber from which it is absent. The full institutional recomposition remains to come.
To these internal constraints are added external pressures. Nepal finds itself under the crossed pressures of India, the United States and China. Beijing, which had traditionally relied on the Nepali communist parties as privileged interlocutors, sees these formations durably weakened; the RSP has moreover removed from its programme the China-backed Damak industrial park project. The new government inherits a regional game it has no experience in navigating.
The arrest of Oli
At its very first meeting, on 27 March, the Shah cabinet voted to implement the recommendations of the high-level commission of inquiry. In the early hours of 28 March, police arrested Oli at his residence in Bhaktapur, and Ramesh Lekhak. [6]
The commission did not establish that Oli had ordered the security forces to open fire; it did find that neither Oli nor Lekhak had taken any step to halt the firing that killed 19 protesters on the single day of 8 September 2025, and that their subsequent statements of ignorance of the events amounted to criminal negligence. The charges brought, for death caused by recklessness or negligence, carry three to ten years in prison. [7]
The operational link between the uprising and the arrests is embodied in a single figure. Sudan Gurung, 38, founder of Hami Nepal (We, Nepal) — the civic platform whose Discord servers had structured the self-organisation of September 2025 — was appointed Home Minister on the very day of Shah’s swearing-in. A former DJ turned humanitarian activist after the 2015 earthquake, Gurung had negotiated directly with the chief of the army over the choice of the interim Prime Minister Sushila Karki. Elected MP for Gorkha-1 with 29,896 votes, he received the most sensitive portfolio in the cabinet. [8] Gurung announced the arrests on social media: “No one is above the law. This is not revenge — it is only the beginning of justice.”
Oli, 74, who has undergone two kidney transplants and suffers from heart problems, was transferred to hospital shortly after his arrest. After thirteen days in detention, the Supreme Court ordered his release on 9 April, holding that his detention was no longer necessary for the investigation and that his state of health called for a swift resolution. [9] Oli and Lekhak were released on condition of future appearance. Neither has, to date, been formally charged; both deny any responsibility. The investigation remains open.
A routed left and unresolved stakes
The CPN-UML’s response was immediate: denunciation of the detentions as a political vendetta, a call for staggered mobilisations. The gap between the announced programme and actual mobilisation was, however, stark: the day after the arrests, attendance in Kathmandu had dropped to around 200 people, with the main leaders staying away from the streets. [10] The NC leadership held a calculated ambivalence — calling the Karki report “one-sided” without joining the streets — while the NCP took no action at all.
A distinct voice on the left came from Harka Sampang Rai, president of the SSP. Former mayor of Dharan, son of a former Gurkha in the British army, Sampang belongs to the indigenous Rai community of eastern Nepal. He built the SSP on a programme combining labour culture, an anti-corruption politics, and proportional representation for indigenous nationalities, Madheshis, Dalits and Muslims. He described the arrests as “political reprisals” and called on the state to pursue with equal rigour those who had set fire to Singha Durbar, to Parliament and to the Supreme Court — not only those who had ordered the repression. This position — neither a defence of Oli nor an endorsement of the government framing — pointed to a political space that the older left formations had not occupied: a non-partisan demand for accountability, applied on either side of the divide.
For the families of the September victims, the arrests carried a meaning of a quite different order: that of a long-awaited rupture in a tradition of impunity. The repression extended a cumulative record of failures — torture in custody, persistent discrimination against Dalits and marginalised communities, transitional justice commissions challenged by victims’ organisations. [11]
The Nepali economy remains heavily dependent on remittances from the diaspora — roughly one third of GDP. The frustration that fuelled the revolt was not that of a macroeconomic collapse, but that of corruption, unequal distribution and the closing off of opportunity for a large and connected youth. Oli’s arrest is the most spectacular episode of a crisis that long predates it. The SSP, founded four months before the election, overtook both of the large communist formations in Koshi Province — on their own historic ground.
The Nepali left parties — unable to articulate clear positions on ownership of the means of production, on remittance dependence, or on the structural exclusion of indigenous and Dalit communities — could not channel the popular anger of September. They became its targets. The revolt carried no ideological banner, and when the new formation that emerged from it took power and then had the most prominent figure of the left arrested, it did so with broad popular approval. What remains of the organised Nepali left must confront a fundamental question: why, when Nepalis rose against an unjust order, did they turn to a rapper, a former DJ and a party born from the rubble — rather than to the parties that for decades had claimed to represent them.
The verdict is not a matter of an electoral cycle. It is the — provisional — balance sheet of twenty years in which the left failed to keep what it had promised.
Notes
[1] G. Prakash, “A great election for Nepal’s upper castes and royalists”, Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article76200.
[2] A. R. Mulmi, “Nepal’s Hindu monarchy is finished – Or maybe not”, Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article76188.
[3] P. Rana, “Nepalis show their failed political class what they think of them”, Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article76206.
[4] According to the findings of the Karki commission of inquiry.
[5] “South Asia’s Youth Uprisings: Three Countries, Three Years, One Crisis”, Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article76622.
[6] “Justice or Politics? Understanding the Arrest of Oli and Lekhak”, Nepal News, 28 March 2026, https://english.nepalnews.com/s/politics/justice-or-politics-understanding-the-arrest-of-oli-and-lekhak/.
[7] Human Rights Watch, “Nepal: Unlawful Use of Force During ‘Gen Z’ Protest”, 19 November 2025, https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/11/19/nepal-unlawful-use-of-force-during-gen-z-protest.
[8] “What home minister Sudan Gurung’s first week in office looked like”, The Kathmandu Post, 3 April 2026, https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/04/03/new-home-minister-s-unconventional-approach-to-governance-raises-eyebrows.
[9] “Oli, Lekhak released following court order”, The Kathmandu Post, 9 April 2026, https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/04/09/oli-lekhak-released-following-court-order.
[10] “UML protest sees cadres injured as top leaders stay away from streets”, Khabarhub, 29 March 2026, https://english.khabarhub.com/2026/30/541747/.
[11] Indigenous nationalities (Adivasi Janajati) make up between 35 and 50 per cent of the population; Dalits and Madheshis face structural exclusion from state institutions. See International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), Nepal country profile, https://iwgia.org/en/nepal.
Adam Novak and Pierre Rousset are editors of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.
The French original of this article first appeared on the website of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières. This English translation first appeared on the same site.
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).
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