Nepal heads into first post-uprising election

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Balendra Shah (right), Rastriya Swatantra Party election candidate and Kathmandu's former mayor greets supporters during a door-to-door election campaign at Gauriganj in Jhapa district on Monday. japantimes.co.jp

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Nepal votes on March 5 in its first national election since September’s anti-corruption protests toppled the government, a moment being sold as a democratic reset but more plausibly a reallocation of who controls the state’s levers. According to AFP via The Japan Times, the eastern constituency of Jhapa-5 has become a symbolic battleground: it is the stronghold of KP Sharma Oli, the 73-year-old Marxist and four-time prime minister who was forced out by the unrest and is now campaigning for a return.

The campaign imagery is telling. Competing flags and party symbols flutter over tea farms and brick homes in Jhapa, a district that suddenly matters because Nepal’s politics remains intensely centralized even when it performs localism. The post-uprising mood has elevated anti-establishment figures and parties promising to clean up Kathmandu’s rent-seeking culture. Yet the institutional reality is that Nepal’s state remains the country’s largest prize: control over appointments, procurement, policing and the distribution of permits and projects.

This is where decentralization rhetoric becomes a stress test. After an upheaval justified in the language of accountability, voters are being asked to choose between factions that all understand the same incentive: whoever commands the center can trade access for loyalty down the chain. Local autonomy is popular in principle, but expensive. If fiscal powers and administrative discretion truly move outward, local governments become more directly responsible for service delivery—and therefore more directly blamed for failures. That is a risk politicians rarely embrace unless they also get new revenue streams or new borrowing capacity.

Nepal’s economy adds another constraint: remittances and aid flows cushion households while insulating the political class from the discipline of domestic taxpaying. A state funded indirectly can afford to treat elections as legitimacy rituals rather than performance evaluations. The likely outcome, then, is not liberalization but a new equilibrium: a reshuffled patronage network with fresh branding.

The post-uprising election could still matter if it produces a government willing to reduce discretionary licensing, simplify taxes, and shrink the space for corruption by shrinking the state’s footprint. But Nepal’s major parties have historically preferred the opposite: more programs, more committees, more “anti-corruption” bodies with budgets and immunity. If the uprising’s energy is absorbed into the same machinery, the country will have changed who gets the keys, without changing what the keys open.