The 2026 general election marked a political turning point, bringing a new generation of leaders to power and reshaping the country’s party system. Balendra Shah, Kathmandu’s independent mayor and a popular figure among young protesters during the September 2025 uprising, joined the Ravi Lamichhane-led Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) in December 2025.
He subsequently won a seat in the House of Representatives on the RSP ticket, was elected the party’s parliamentary leader, and became prime minister in March 2026. The RSP won 182 of the House’s 275 seats, securing a near-supermajority and leaving the Nepali Congress (NC) a much-reduced opposition.
The election followed a youth-led uprising that began with protests against restrictions on social media but quickly broadened into a nationwide challenge to corruption, political privilege, and the established parties’ failure to respond to public aspirations. The unrest left 76 people dead and thousands injured.
The outcome was more than a transfer of power. It exposed a crisis of representation and raised a basic question: what enables democratic governments to earn and sustain public legitimacy? For the NC the question is acute: how can a party with a substantial democratic inheritance recover public confidence after voters sharply cut its parliamentary strength and rejected its claim to represent their aspirations?
In “A New Chapter for the Nepali Congress: Reflections at a Moment of Transition,” I examined the relationship between the party’s inheritance and the need for generational and organizational renewal; the 2026 result gives that question new urgency. The task is to reconnect the party’s democratic legacy with the expectations of a changing electorate, a challenge that reflects a wider democratic predicament: public distrust, demands for effective government, and tension between popular mandates and constitutional limits.
The setting in which the NC must answer these questions is defined by the party in government. The RSP’s mandate is one of expectation: its legitimacy will be tested less by the size of its majority than by whether demands for accountability, opportunity, and competent government are met. Its capacity to deliver remains unproven, since every new government inherits the implementation gap (see Governing Performance), and a majority this large removes the constraint of coalition bargaining, leaving restraint to the government’s own forbearance and to the institutions and opposition outside it.
What the government delivers is beyond the NC’s choice or prediction, but the NC’s responsibilities do not change. If the government delivers substantially, the opposition must contest what remains inadequate and acknowledge what is done well. If it delivers partially, the opposition must make the gap between announcement and implementation specific and public. If it overreaches, constitutional limits must be defended.
In every case, the NC must hold the government to its own mandate, address what it leaves unresolved, and put its own house in order. The 15th General Convention must therefore mark the beginning of renewal from opposition: the NC cannot reclaim the future by resting on its past or waiting for the RSP to fail, and its return to the centre of national politics is neither assured nor owed.
Democratic legitimacy rests on three interdependent dimensions: electoral authorisation, governing performance, and constitutional restraint. Elections authorise a government to act; performance tests whether it can turn that authority into public benefit; restraint keeps power within the rules that sustain democracy. The same standards apply to opposition parties, which must scrutinise the government, develop credible alternatives, and demonstrate democratic integrity, beginning with their internal processes. The article examines each dimension in turn and then applies the framework to the NC’s position in opposition.
Political legitimacy in a changing democratic world
Free and fair elections are indispensable, but public confidence also depends on whether institutions uphold the law, use public resources responsibly, protect rights, and respond to citizens’ needs. Efficiency bought at the expense of rights and accountability undermines democracy just as surely as electoral success without effective governance erodes confidence in it. The 2026 result shows both the force and the limits of electoral authorisation.
The RSP’s near-supermajority contrasted sharply with the NC’s 14 per cent of seats and the CPN (UML)’s 8 per cent of seats: voters were willing to break with established loyalties and entrust a newer force with government. The RSP’s anti-corruption message and appeal to younger voters channelled demands for accountability and opportunity, and the legacy parties’ defeat suggests that historical credentials and entrenched networks carry less electoral value than before. The September 2025 protests pointed to dissatisfaction with institutional performance, and with the gap between democratic promises and everyday experience, rather than rejection of democracy itself, though the protests alone cannot settle the point.
Mobilising discontent and governing effectively are different tasks. Campaigns can unite diverse grievances around a promise of change; governments must translate that promise into legislation, budgets, administrative decisions, and measurable results. A large majority creates room for action but does not remove the need for competent administration, sound policy, fiscal discipline, or coordination across government. Electoral authorisation is the starting point of democratic government, not proof of its effectiveness.
The three-part distinction is this article’s own device, but it draws on work that treats legitimacy as depending at once on state capacity, accountability, and limits on power: Fukuyama on the capable state and its decay, Acemoglu and Robinson on capacity and constraint developing together, and Levitsky and Ziblatt on the informal norms of restraint.
Governing performance: From promises to public value
The new government’s immediate test is whether it can convert political expectations into durable improvements in public services, infrastructure, employment, and economic opportunity. Nepal’s development challenge lies partly in the gap between budget allocations and actual delivery. According to the World Bank, federal capital-budget execution averaged about 62 per cent in recent years, while combined capital spending by federal, provincial, and local governments fell from 11.4 per cent of GDP in fiscal year 2021 to approximately 7.5 per cent in fiscal year 2025. The Bank also identifies persistent obstacles: weak project preparation, procurement delays, land acquisition, forest clearances, cash-management problems, and limited administrative capacity. These shortcomings show why political will alone cannot deliver development.
Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay (2014) explains why institutional foundations are not enough. He treats modern political order as the combination of a capable state, the rule of law, and democratic accountability, and holds that decay sets in when institutions fail to adapt or are captured by privileged groups and turned toward patronage. The 1990 movement, the 2006 peace settlement, and the 2015 Constitution helped establish the foundations of democratic accountability and the rule of law but did not automatically produce a capable administration or broadly shared prosperity. Frequent changes of government, patronage, corruption allegations, and weak implementation eroded public confidence, the pattern Fukuyama describes.
The pressure for visible results, which digital platforms intensify (see the next section), makes announcement more tempting than implementation. The government must therefore prioritise the institutional work: preparing viable projects, assigning clear responsibilities and timelines, improving procurement, and publishing results that citizens can scrutinise.
Publication matters for a second reason. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor (2019) argues that liberty is secured only where a capable state is matched by a mobilised society able to constrain it: a weak state cannot protect citizens or deliver services, while an unconstrained state is a danger in itself. Capacity must therefore grow alongside society’s ability to contest the exercise of power. Federalism is the clearest test of this problem. Devolution brings government closer to citizens only when accompanied by adequate resources, administrative capacity, and accountability; otherwise, it multiplies the points at which implementation can fail.
Economic policy raises equally practical demands. The added point is political. Acemoglu’s What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity (2026) supplies the mechanism: where insecurity is widespread, opportunity is unequal, and people feel they have little voice, alienation grows and confidence in democratic institutions declines. Migration is both an economic response and a political signal that domestic institutions cannot offer credible prospects at home.
Private investment requires predictable rules, fair competition, access to finance, and protection from arbitrary decisions; public investment should address infrastructure and human-development gaps that markets alone cannot resolve. The objective should be shared prosperity, not growth measured only by aggregate output, and economic progress strengthens democratic legitimacy when opportunity is not restricted to politically connected groups. Corruption control must support this agenda. Procurement, appointments, conflicts of interest, and the use of public resources require transparent rules and independent scrutiny, while investigations must be evidence-based and subject to due process; otherwise, anti-corruption campaigns become instruments of selective punishment rather than mechanisms for better governance.
The same implementation gap constrains foreign policy. Nepal’s position between India and China offers finance, technology, market access, and infrastructure, but the benefits depend on whether Nepal can evaluate proposals, negotiate sound agreements, manage debt, and ensure that projects serve long-term priorities. Limited public-sector capacity, unpredictable regulation, and repeated policy disruptions can keep the country from turning geography into lasting gains; doing so requires strategic consistency rather than short-term calculation. Major agreements on infrastructure, energy, connectivity, and external financing therefore warrant the same transparent scrutiny as domestic projects, covering economic viability, environmental consequences, debt implications, and effects on national autonomy. Foreign policy is an instrument of national development.
Populism, constitutional restraint, and democratic resilience
Digital platforms have accelerated the break with established parties. They let citizens expose abuses and organise outside party structures, but they reward emotional appeals, misinformation, and leaders who promise immediate solutions to complex problems. Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher (The Age of AI, 2021) identify four characteristics of the information environment: immediacy, intensity, conformity, and polarisation. Immediacy and intensity help explain why governments face pressure to show visible results before institutions can produce durable ones; conformity and polarisation help explain why scrutiny can be portrayed as disloyalty and compromise can look like betrayal. These are pressures, not a theory of populism’s causes. Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s Power and Progress (2023) makes a complementary point: outcomes depend on institutions, incentives, and the distribution of power. Digital mobilisation amplifies grievances with institutional and economic roots; it does not create them.
Populism often frames politics as a struggle between an authentic people and a corrupt establishment. Jan-Werner Müller’s What Is Populism? (2016) locates its defining feature in the claim to exclusive moral representation of the people. That critique can expose genuine failures; the danger arises when leaders use the claim of exclusive representation to portray independent institutions, critical media, or political opposition as illegitimate. The challenge is not to choose between popular leadership and established institutions, but to make power more responsive while preserving the checks that keep it accountable.
The risk of such claims is acute after a landslide, when no coalition partner constrains the majority. An electoral mandate authorises government within constitutional limits; it does not diminish the rights of those who voted against the winner or authorise the erosion of oversight. Independent courts, a free press, parliamentary scrutiny, and legitimate opposition are essential safeguards against the abuse of democratic power. A large majority and strong public demand for rapid change can encourage the belief that institutional checks merely protect the old establishment.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die (2018) explains what holds against that belief. Democracy depends not only on written rules but also on informal norms: mutual toleration, which treats political opponents as legitimate rivals, and institutional forbearance, which limits the exercise of formal powers. The test of a large majority is often less what the law permits it to do than what it chooses not to do. Weakening oversight risks reproducing the concentration of power that political change was meant to correct.
Their later work, Tyranny of the Minority (2023), adds a qualification: counter-majoritarian institutions designed to constrain majority power can also entrench minority rule. Restraint is therefore not automatically served by every check. The answer is to separate unnecessary bureaucracy from safeguards that protect rights and prevent abuse: checks that merely shield incumbents deserve reform, while checks that protect rights deserve defence. In practice, that means simplifying procedures without removing essential protections, enforcing the law without politicising justice, and accelerating decisions without abandoning due process. Constitutional restraint should enable effective government, not excuse paralysis; as The Narrow Corridor argues, capacity and restraint must develop together.
Online popularity can be mistaken for a durable public mandate. Governments must respond to legitimate criticism without treating every demand as a directive, and parties must engage citizens beyond election campaigns and online messaging, because deliberation requires evidence, competing arguments, and institutions capable of turning public concerns into sound decisions. Restraint applies to opposition as well. Criticism is not disloyalty, and disagreement is not necessarily obstruction. Mutual toleration runs both ways: the government must accept opposition as legitimate, and the opposition must accept the government’s mandate while contesting its decisions. The responsibilities differ: the government is answerable for results, the opposition for the quality of its scrutiny and its alternatives. Resilience depends on combining responsiveness with institutional continuity: governments must be able to correct failures, while constitutional protections ensure that political competition remains peaceful, rights endure, and power can change hands without destabilising the state.
The Nepali Congress: From electoral defeat to political renewal
For the NC, the 2026 election exposed weaknesses extending beyond electoral strategy and leadership. Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022) observes that liberal democracies lose support when they cannot deliver effective government and citizens experience the system as unresponsive. The NC’s defeat fits that pattern. The party contested the election projecting Gagan Thapa as its future prime minister, yet suffered a severe defeat. Its diminished parliamentary presence revealed a widening gap between its historic contribution to Nepal’s democratic struggle and its present credibility, raising questions about its political purpose, policy vision, and ability to respond to a changing society. The defeat suggested that a change in leadership, however significant, would not by itself restore public confidence.
Seven months after the election, the party’s 15th General Convention elected Thapa president for a full term with near-unanimous support, although a section of the party has challenged the Convention’s legitimacy through the courts. Vishwa Prakash Sharma, who had stood alongside Thapa before the election, was unanimously elected senior vice president, a newly created position reflecting his standing within the party’s top leadership. Thapa’s strong backing, the support of younger leaders, and the participation of many who had previously been on the opposing side helped create a broader and more cohesive leadership base. Yet a leadership mandate does not, in itself, amount to political renewal.
The Convention has created an opportunity for renewal, but it is conditional. A broader leadership base can facilitate change or reproduce established practices under new leaders; a renewed image cannot substitute for sound policy or organisational accountability; and a distinguished legacy cannot relieve the party of the need to demonstrate its contemporary relevance. This challenge is inseparable from the party’s organisational condition.
The NC’s nationwide presence and accumulated experience should enable it to understand local concerns and develop responsive policies. Yet organisational reach loses much of its value when factional competition, patronage, and the distribution of influence take precedence. Likewise, internal unity has limited significance if it rests on bargains among leaders rather than shared principles and accepted procedures. The broader consensus achieved at the Convention will matter most if it helps the party move beyond factional management toward building institutions that encourage participation, reward competence, and hold leaders accountable.
An early priority for Thapa and his colleagues in leadership will be to reach out to those who have questioned the Convention’s legitimacy and explore ways to bridge the differences. Dialogue and reconciliation will take sustained effort, but these should proceed alongside the broader task of strengthening the party’s organisation and institutions.
As the principal opposition, the NC must scrutinize the government, defend constitutional principles, and offer credible policy alternatives. A government’s mandate does not remove the need for restraint, but opposition does not automatically confer legitimacy on its critics. The NC must distinguish ordinary policy disagreement from constitutional overreach and apply its commitment to accountability equally to political opponents and to its own past and present leadership. The quality of opposition will depend on the quality of the alternative.
Employment, migration, productive investment, education, public services, federalism, and the distribution of opportunity are interconnected questions, taken up above. The NC must move beyond broad declarations of commitment to prosperity and inclusion and show how its approach would improve people’s lives, connecting immediate concerns to longer-term priorities.
The new leadership must also reconcile generational renewal with institutional experience. Thapa and the younger leaders around him bring energy and the possibility of a different approach, but their contribution should be judged not by age, public appeal, or position, but by whether they change the practices that weakened the NC’s credibility. Senior leaders’ experience should inform renewal rather than constrain it; the aim is neither to break with the past nor to preserve it uncritically. The urgency comes from what the 2025 uprising and the 2026 verdict demanded: opportunity, dignity, and institutions that serve citizens rather than established interests. Frustration with established parties cannot be overcome by adopting anti-establishment language. The NC must show that democratic institutions can deliver while protecting rights, pluralism, and accountability.
Democratic renewal must be earned
The central question is whether this transition can produce not merely a change of leadership, but a more capable, accountable, and inclusive democratic order. For the RSP, the test is whether its mandate yields tangible improvements while respecting constitutional limits and remaining open to scrutiny: effective government without restraint can damage democracy, and safeguards without results can erode public confidence. Federalism and foreign policy, though distinct in scope, illustrate how democratic commitments depend on institutions capable of translating them into coordinated action and tangible public benefits.
The NC’s place in Nepal’s democratic life will depend on whether the new leadership builds an opposition that is substantive in its criticism, fair in its judgment, constructive in its alternatives, and willing to accept the same scrutiny it demands of the government. An established democratic party can learn from electoral rejection and adapt to changing expectations without abandoning the principles that gave it legitimacy. These challenges extend beyond individual parties. Nepal needs a state that delivers public goods while remaining accountable, uses technology without impoverishing public deliberation, and pursues development whose benefits reach across society.
Democratic renewal will ultimately be measured not by electoral victory or historical inheritance, but by how responsibly power is exercised, how effectively institutions serve citizens, and whether public trust is earned through performance and accountability. The election has created the possibility; the conduct of those who govern and those who oppose them will determine whether it is realised.
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