(TibetanReview.net, Mar09’26) – Although the votes are still being counted, the final outcome is a foregone conclusion, with the only question being the margins of victory, or defeat, as the case may be. The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) of 35-year-old rapper and ex-Kathmandu mayor Balendra Shah is on course to win a landslide majority in parliament. Shah has also defeated former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, 74, in Jhapa 5 – traditionally a safe seat for him – by a huge margin, paving the way for him to become the next prime minister.
For years China has persuaded, coerced and otherwise lobbied with the country’s disparate communist parties, especially the two big ones, to come together to form a coalition government that would conceivably be at its beck and call in carrying out its agenda.
Geo-strategist Brahma Chellaney has described the outcome as a blow to Beijing’s influence in Kathmandu. He has argued that years of Chinese efforts to cultivate a unified leftist bloc in Nepal have been overturned by the vote.
“Nepal’s voters have swept away not only a discredited political class but also years of careful geopolitical engineering by outside powers,” he wrote in an X (formerly Twitter) platform post titled: “A Political Earthquake in Kathmandu”.
He has said the rout of the two main communist parties (Oli’s CPI-UML and former Maoist guerrilla Prachanda’s CPN) in the election is a “major setback for China’s neighbourhood strategy.”
“For years, Beijing worked to stitch together ‘leftist unity’ between these two parties to secure a stable, pro-Beijing government in Kathmandu. Now, with both parties reduced to minor players, China finds its preferred communist channels of influence abruptly stranded,” he has written.
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The elections will choose 275 new representatives to Nepal’s lower house of parliament. While 165 of the seats are chosen directly, the remaining 110 are chosen by proportional representation (to ensure that seats in parliament correspond to total votes won by each party).
Not all results are in yet; but so far Shah’s RSP has won 125 of the 165 direct-vote seats, and 58 of the 110 proportional representation seats for which nominations are made by the concerned parties.
Contrast this with the fact that Oli’s CPI-UML has won only eight of the direct-vote seats and 16 of the proportional representation seats by latest vote counts. Besides, the Nepali Congress has won 17 direct-vote seats, the NCP seven, and the Shram Sanskriti Party three.
That would place the RSP well above the 138 seats required for a simple majority. The outcome also clears the way for Shah to become Nepal’s next prime minister. Shah defeated Oli by about 50,000 votes and is all but assured of becoming the country’s first Madhesi Prime Minister and the youngest elected executive head in its parliamentary history.
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China’s reaction to Nepal’s elections has been carefully neutral, diplomatic, and cautious. It has publicly congratulated Nepal on the conduct of the elections, with Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning emphasizing Beijing’s desire to maintain friendly relations with Nepal and continue cooperation, stressing that the two countries are “traditional friendly neighbours.”
Oli has been an unabashedly pro-China figure who sometimes took potshots at neighbour India as if to prove his point.
Nepal is important for China’s Belt and Road infrastructure projects, although nothing has fructified so far despite years of holding talks, and Himalayan strategic access.
The country is also important for China to monitor and crackdown on the activities of the Tibetan community seen by Beijing as anti-China. The vast majority of Tibetan refugees in the country, estimated to be over 20,000, remain undocumented due to pressure exerted on Kathmandu by Beijing.