Balendra Shah Set to Become Nepal’s Youngest Prime Minister

In Nepal, counting of 165 seats under the first-past-the-post system has been completed, and counting for proportional representation is continuing.

• Under the first-past-the-post system, the National Independent Party has won 125 constituencies, the Nepali Congress has won 18 seats, UML has won 10 seats and NCP has won 8 seats. RPP has won 1 seat, Labour Culture Party has won 3 seats and one Independent candidate has won 1 seat.
• RSP is the biggest winner in the March 5 election, therefore RSP has to choose its parliamentary party leader. During the election campaign, RSP had gained votes by promising to make Balendra Shah the Prime Minister. If RSP continues to fulfill its promise, then Balendra Shah will become the youngest PM of Nepal.
• Balen, who often wears black clothes, wears signature rectangular sunglasses and is known as a 'disruptor' in Nepal, defeated Oli by 50,000 votes from the Jhapa 5 constituency of eastern Nepal. Now he is going to become the new Prime Minister of Nepal and will be the youngest Prime Minister to sit on this post.
• Now the EC has to present the election report to the President. After this the President will call a new session of the House of Representatives within 30 days.
• After the session of the House of Representatives begins, the most senior member of the House will administer the oath of office and secrecy to all the elected members.
• According to Article 76(1) of the Constitution, the President will appoint the leader of the parliamentary party with majority in the House of Representatives as the Prime Minister and the Council of Ministers will be formed under his chairmanship.

About Balendra Shah

• Balen, who comes from the Madhesi community (from southern Nepal which is on the border with India from Bihar) and also speaks Maithili, which is a language commonly spoken in Bihar and Jharkhand, is the son of a homemaker and an Ayurvedic doctor.
• Shah once walked in the corridors of NITTE Meenakshi Institute of Technology (NMIT) in Bengaluru, where he did M.Tech in Structural Engineering (a sub-discipline of Civil Engineering).
• Shah had joined the institute in 2016 with two other Nepali students, Sunil Lamsal and Praveen Shrestha, and they were part of the college’s first autonomous batch.
• Today, 35-year-old Balen is at the center of the same system that he once criticized. In his interviews he has said that after challenging the existing situation he wants to try to change it from inside.
• Together with the National Independent Party (RSP) he is leading a political movement that has achieved a huge victory in Nepal’s general elections, this is the first election after the Gen Z protest which had brought down the government.
• After the protest there were large-scale incidents of unrest and arson, in which 70 people were killed and the four-time Prime Minister of the Communist Party K.P. Sharma Oli had to resign.

About Nepal

• Nepal is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mainly located in the Himalayas, but it also includes some parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain of India. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China in the north and India in the south, east and west, while it is slightly separated from Bangladesh by the Siliguri Corridor and from Bhutan by the Indian state of Sikkim.
• Nepal has diverse geography, including fertile plains, sub-alpine forested hills and eight of the world’s ten highest mountains, including Mount Everest, which is the highest point on Earth above sea level. Kathmandu is the capital of the country and its largest city.
• Parliamentary democracy started in 1951, but the Nepali kings suspended it twice in 1960 and 2005. The Nepali Civil War of the 1990s and early 2000s resulted in the formation of a secular republic in 2008, which ended the world’s last Hindu monarchy.
• Nepal’s constitution adopted in 2015 considers the country a federal parliamentary republic divided into seven provinces. In September 2025, riots occurred due to protests against social media ban, economic inequality and corruption, in which many people were killed and the Prime Minister had to resign.