Nepal’s youth want practical socioeconomic solutions over actor-centric politics. Is Nepali politics ready to deliver it?

A year after Nepal’s Gen Z movement, the country’s established political parties still appear unable to understand the forces that pushed them aside. The Rastriya Swatantra Party, formed only four years ago, now leads the government and parliament and sets much of the political agenda, while older parties struggle to recover from the September 2025 movement and the electoral results that followed.

At the centre of that transformation were young people, especially a politically disenchanted generation. Many had once been directly or indirectly involved with mainstream parties, but later mobilised through non-traditional channels. Their demands raised fundamental questions: what drove their dissatisfaction, what kind of political participation did they want, and whether the changes that followed have addressed their concerns.

Those questions have received little serious attention in academia or public debate, the article argues. Nepali political culture continues to focus on individual actors rather than substantive agendas, creating fatigue around political discussion. The same tendency can be seen in the new government’s approach to youth issues.

Although the average age of federal ministers and lower-house lawmakers has fallen, the core concerns of young Nepalis remain largely outside the political centre. Education, productivity, employment and social security continue to compete with older political arguments. The article places this problem within a broader political-economy debate about how changing forms of economic development, particularly the rise of a service economy before a strong manufacturing base, are creating new social groups with different political expectations.