A 35-year-old former mayor who first came to prominence as a rapper will become Nepal’s next and youngest-ever prime minister after his supporters triggered an electoral landslide and vanquished the country’s ruling communist party.
Though an engineer by trade, Balendra Shah began releasing hip-hop music under the name “Balen” in the early 2010s. In 2022, he won an election to become mayor of Kathmandu — Nepal’s capital and largest city — at the age of 32, running as a populist anti-corruption independent candidate. He joined the then-three-year-old Rastriya Swatantra (National Independent) Party in 2025, which selected him to be its prime ministerial candidate in the March election. The new party won a significant majority of directly elected single-member seats, The Guardian reported Sunday.
The Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist), however, lost nearly 90% of its directly-elected seats, according to The Kathmandu Post. The party’s leader, former Nepalese Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli, the most recent person to serve in this role in a non-interim capacity, lost reelection in his own district to Shah by a nearly four-to-one margin, the BBC reported.
Oil resigned in disgrace in September 2025 following massive protests led by Generation Z sparked by the Marxist prime minister’s decision to ban popular websites such as X, Facebook, and YouTube. The protests resulted in 77 deaths after the Nepali police chief gave the order to open fire on the young demonstrators, according to the BBC. Oli, nevertheless remained in the House following his resignation and replacement by interim prime minister Sushila Karki, an independent.
As of Sunday afternoon EDT, Shah’s party won 124 — 74% — of 165 seats in Nepal’s House of Representatives, and was leading in one additional constituency, according to The Kathmandu Post. The left-leaning Nepali Congress party came in a very distant second place in the direct seat count, winning just 17, a number dwarfed by Rastriya Swatantra’s triple-digit figure. Oli’s party came in third in the direct seat count, winning only eight seats, down from the 78 it won in the previous election.
Due to Nepal’s mixed voting system, the additional 110 seats in the country’s House will be determined through proportional representation over the coming week, according to the Guardian. Still, Shah’s party seems on track to win most of these seats due to winning the popular vote by over a 30-point margin, according to results from Election Commission Nepal.
While himself a member of the millennial generation, Shah’s victory came in large part due to his support among Generation Z voters whose 2025 protests helped bring the communists’ rule to an end, according to the BBC.
Ramesh Paudyal, a senior leader in Shah’s party, called the landslide win “the victory of hope and change” and “the most beautiful endorsement of the Gen Z movement,” according to the Guardian.
“The true tribute to the Gen Z martyrs will be expressed through the work carried out every day by the government led by Balendra Shah,” Paduyal continued, referring to the dozens of protesters who lost their lives after police opened fire on them.
Shah is far from the first person in the world to transition from making hip-hop music to a successful career in politics; some ex-rappers have even made significant electoral breakthroughs in the United States.
Democratic New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani notably launched a rap career under the name “Mr. Cardamom” before defeating an incumbent state assemblywoman in 2020. Five years later, he bested former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in both the Democratic primary and general election to win the job to lead the U.S.’s largest city.
New York’s Democratic Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado also dabbled in rap before entering politics. Delgado, a lawyer who made music under the name “AD The Voice,” was elected to Congress in 2018, unseating a Republican incumbent. He served in the House until Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed him to become her lieutenant governor in 2022.
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