Gen Z Needs Political Parties of Its Own

Gen Z has a political problem: it is the first fully digital generation, but it is still being governed through an analog democracy.

This is not a criticism of the Rastriya Swatantra Party, nor a dismissal of Nepal’s older and more established political parties. Each has its own role, history and contribution to the country’s democratic journey, both past and future. But the challenge facing Gen Z goes beyond the strengths or weaknesses of any individual party. The deeper problem is the system in which all of them must operate. Nepal’s political operating system was built for another century.

A 23-year-old today can build a company from a bedroom, work for someone on another continent, earn a living as a creator, learn from an AI tutor, raise money online and organize thousands of strangers through a group chat. Then that same person enters politics and the clock suddenly turns backward. Join the youth wing. Carry the flag. Learn the ideology. Campaign for senior leaders. Climb the hierarchy. Wait your turn. Perhaps, decades from now, you will finally be allowed to lead. For a generation accustomed to building, publishing, organizing and collaborating almost instantly, that is not merely slow politics. It is politics designed for a different world.

That frustration is already spilling onto streets around the world. In France, students protesting teacher shortages and deteriorating schools have forced the government to fully or partially close hundreds of high schools amid the unrest. Indonesian youth have rallied against corruption and government spending. Serbian students have challenged political corruption, young Moroccans have demanded better education, healthcare and jobs, and young Filipinos have protested alleged corruption. The triggers are different, but the underlying frustration is strikingly similar: a generation increasingly questioning whether institutions built for an earlier era can deliver the future it is being asked to inherit.

And that future is not simply a younger version of the world inherited by their parents.

Consider work. A university graduate entering the labour market today must confront the possibility that AI can already perform parts of the entry-level job that was supposed to provide the first step into a career. A designer competes with image generators. A junior programmer increasingly works alongside coding agents. Writers work in a world of large language models. Drivers may eventually confront autonomous vehicles. Yet much of our political debate remains focused on the familiar promise of creating more jobs. Gen Z also needs economists and politicians willing to confront a harder question: What happens when economic growth itself becomes less dependent on human labour?

Then consider housing. In many major cities, young adults confront rents and house prices that make the traditional path to ownership increasingly difficult. Their parents were told that education, employment and patience would eventually produce economic security. For many young people, that sequence no longer feels reliable. They can have degrees, jobs and two incomes and still struggle to accumulate the assets previous generations associated with adulthood. This changes politics. A generation without meaningful access to assets will think differently about taxation, inheritance, urban planning, wages and the distribution of wealth than a generation whose wealth rose alongside property values.

Even the meaning of employment has changed. A teenager can become a creator. A programmer in Kathmandu can work for a company in California. A designer can sell digital work globally. A driver can work through a ride-sharing platform without technically working for the platform. A freelancer can have five clients in four countries and no employer in the traditional sense. Yet labour law, taxation, social insurance and political thinking still largely assume that work happens between an employee and an employer inside a national economy.

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The same mismatch appears in privacy. Previous generations worried about governments tapping telephones. Gen Z carries a device capable of recording location, communication, photographs, searches, purchases and social relationships. Its face can become biometric data. Its behaviour can train algorithms. Its online history can influence how companies understand it. Governments and corporations possess forms of informational power that were technologically impossible for most of the twentieth century. For Gen Z, privacy is no longer simply the right to close the curtains. It is the question of who owns the digital shadow a human being leaves behind.

Gen Z also understands propaganda differently. A politician’s speech does not disappear when the rally ends. Somebody has the clip. A promise made six months ago can be retrieved in seconds. A government statement can be compared with satellite images, databases, archived webpages and thousands of eyewitness videos. This makes some Orwellian techniques of controlling political memory harder to sustain uncontested.

Governments can still conceal information, manipulate narratives, restrict social media, censor opponents and conduct surveillance. But citizens now possess counter-tools. The internet did not eliminate propaganda. It weakened the assumption that institutions alone control the archive. For a generation raised on VPNs, mirror sites, encrypted messaging, screenshots and decentralized networks, attempts to control the flow of information can become a technological contest rather than a simple exercise of state authority. Trying to shut a door on social media means confronting a generation that has grown up learning how to find another entrance.

But there is a darker side to this new balance of power. The same generation that can scrutinize governments is itself extraordinarily easy to scrutinize. Its location can be tracked. Its preferences can be inferred. Its attention can be measured. Algorithms can learn what makes it angry, afraid, entertained and engaged. Political persuasion once meant broadcasting the same poster, speech or television advertisement to millions of people. AI makes something far more intimate possible: political messages tailored to individuals according to what data suggests might persuade them.

This is why AI is not simply another policy issue for Gen Z. It will become part of the political environment in which this generation spends its adult life. Today’s 20-year-old will be only 34 in 2040. Decisions being made now about AI, biometric identity, automation, data ownership and surveillance are therefore not abstract debates about some distant future. They are decisions about the ordinary middle-aged lives of people who are young today.

But AI can redistribute informational power in the opposite direction too.

Imagine that Parliament publishes a 900-page budget. Your AI agent reads it before breakfast. It knows which issues you have asked it to monitor. It tells you that university funding was reduced, housing subsidies changed and a new surveillance provision appeared on page 714. You ask who benefits from a particular tax change. It calculates the answer. You ask what the governing party promised during the election. It retrieves the manifesto. You ask how your representative voted on the same issue five years earlier. It finds the record.

Now multiply that capacity by millions of citizens. Government contracts become searchable. Votes become traceable. Campaign promises become measurable. Budgets become readable by ordinary people through AI. A citizen no longer needs to understand a thousand pages of legal language to ask a simple question: What does this government decision mean for me?

That begins to change the information balance between citizen and state. And if technology changes what citizens are capable of knowing and doing, it should also force us to reconsider how democracy itself works.

Representative democracy developed in an era when continuous mass participation was practically impossible. Millions of citizens could not travel to parliament every week. They could not examine every proposed law or communicate instantaneously with one another. Representation was therefore a solution to a technological constraint as well as a political one.

Much of that constraint has disappeared. That does not mean Gen Z should vote on an app twenty times every morning. Democracy still requires expertise, deliberation, institutions and protections against impulsive majorities. But citizens no longer need to choose only between total delegation and an election every few years. On some issues they could participate directly. On others they could delegate authority. They could follow particular issues, challenge decisions and, under carefully designed systems, withdraw delegated authority. Political scientists have already explored models such as liquid democracy that combine elements of representation and direct participation.

Political parties need to evolve with that possibility. Research on youth representation increasingly shows that the barriers begin long before the election day. Young citizens must move from voter to member, member to candidate and candidate to elected representative. At every stage, party organizations act as gatekeepers. The Inter-Parliamentary Union reported in 2026 that only 2.8 percent of parliamentarians worldwide were 30 or younger, while more than a third of parliamentary chambers had nobody in that age group.

But putting more young faces on election posters is not enough. A 29-year-old politician can still operate a 70-year-old political machine. A political party can have millions of followers on TikTok and remain intellectually analog. It can create a youth wing while allowing older leaders to determine ideology, candidates, money and strategy. That is representation without authorship.

This is why Gen Z needs political parties of its own. Not because young people are inherently wiser or more democratic, but because they need the power to formulate political questions around the world they actually inhabit.

Who owns my data? If AI eliminates my job, who owns the productivity it creates? If I work online for three companies in three countries, where do my labour rights exist? If an algorithm denies me a loan, do I have a right to know why? If facial recognition identifies me in a crowd, what rights do I have against the state? If an AI system influences what political information I see, who audits the algorithm?

These questions do not fit comfortably into political arguments inherited from the industrial age. A Gen Z party therefore cannot simply be a younger version of an old party. It needs to experiment with a different kind of politics: continuous participation, contestable leadership, transparent money, machine-readable government data and searchable voting records. Technology should expand the citizen’s capacity to scrutinize power, not merely expand the state’s capacity to scrutinize citizens.

Older generations still belong in that politics. Experience and historical memory matter. Gen Z is no more immune to corruption, authoritarianism or manipulation than any generation before it. This is not old against young. It is about who gets to shape a radically different future. Today’s 20-year-olds will be only 34 in 2040. They will live with decisions being made now about AI, jobs, housing, climate, surveillance and wealth.

That future may eventually require us to imagine something beyond digital democracy: agentic democracy, in which every citizen can have a personal AI agent capable of explaining legislation, following public spending, comparing policies, retrieving political promises and helping people participate continuously rather than once every few years. The agent would not decide for the citizen. Its purpose would be the opposite: to increase the citizen’s capacity to decide for themselves.

That brings us back to Gen Z’s fundamental political problem. The first fully digital, AI-armed generation is still operating inside an analog democracy. From France to Indonesia, Morocco to Serbia, young people are already showing their willingness to take frustration with existing institutions into the streets. But street protests can disrupt a political system; they cannot permanently redesign one. For that, Gen Z needs institutional power.

It does not simply need younger faces inside political structures inherited from previous generations. Nor does it merely need another seat at the existing table. It needs the political power to help redesign the table itself.

A generation facing a radically different future needs political parties of its own. More importantly, it needs a political system designed for the century it will actually live in.

(Shah is the author of Democracy 4.0 and Algorithmocracy.)