Ex-rapper Balendra Shah becomes Nepal’s new PM

Saturday, 14 March 2026 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

A political party led by a rapper-turned-politician has won a sweeping parliamentary majority in Nepal, official results show, capping one of the most dramatic elections in the country’s recent history.

The Rastriya Swatantra Party of Balendra Shah, a 35-year-old former civil engineer and hip-hop artist known simply as “Balen”, secured 182 seats in the 275-member lower house of parliament, the Election Commission said on Thursday, with 125 won directly and a further 57 through proportional representation.

The Nepali Congress party finished in second place, with 38 seats. The Marxist party of veteran four-time Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, whose government was ousted in a youth-led uprising last year, won just 25 seats.

Shah himself defeated the 74-year-old Oli in his own constituency.

Oli, who had dominated Nepali politics for years, congratulated his rival on X, wishing him a “smooth and successful” term.

The September 2025 protests that reshaped the country’s political landscape were initially set off by a government ban on social media, but rapidly swelled into a mass movement against corruption and economic stagnation, leaving at least 77 people dead.

Shah, whose music had long targeted those same grievances, emerged as a figurehead of the unrest, his song Nepal Haseko, or Nepal Smiling, accumulating more than 10 million YouTube views during the turmoil.

His path to likely prime minister, from engineer to rapper to Kathmandu’s first independent mayor in 2022, reflects a generational shift in a country where more than 40 percent of the nearly 30 million population is under 35, yet whose established party leadership has long remained in its 70s.