Balendra Shah ‘Balen’ set to be sworn-in as Nepal’s youngest Prime Minister

Balendra Shah ‘Balen’ was on Thursday elected as the leader of the Parliamentary party of the Rastriya Swatantra Party, paving his way to become Nepal’s youngest elected prime minister on Friday.

The 35-year-old rapper-turned-politician, senior leader of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), which won a landslide victory in the March 5 poll, will also be the first person from the Madhes region to hold the top executive post in the country.

Nepal chose fresher Balendra Shah ‘Balen’ – popular only as Balen – and his RSP to form the next government, decimating the traditional parties in the first general elections since last year’s violent Gen Z protests that sought generational change and a corruption-free regime.

The RSP that had projected Balen as the prime ministerial candidate, secured a massive 182 seats out of a total 275 seats in the House of Representatives (HoR), making it eligible to form a majority government under Article 76 (1) of the Constitution. Of the 275 members of the HoR, 165 are elected through direct voting and 110 through proportionate voting. Soon after the oath-taking ceremony of the newly elected HoR members, the central committee meeting of the RSP formed its Parliamentary party. “The Parliamentary party meeting unanimously elected Balen as its leader, formally qualifying him for the top executive post of the country,” Shanker Shrestha, secretary of the RSP’s central organisation committee, said.

Balen has been given full authority to form the new cabinet under his leadership, Shrestha said.

The members of the new cabinet will be finalised later in the evening, he added.  Earlier, the newly elected members, including Balen, of the HoR took the oath of office at the federal parliament building, beginning the process of government formation three weeks after the voting concluded.

The eldest member of the House, Arjun Narasingha KC, 78, administered the oath of office and secrecy to the newly elected lawmakers at the federal parliament secretariat in Singha Durbar.

As per the tradition, on Wednesday, President Ramchandra Paudel administered the oath of office and secrecy to KC, elected to the Lower House under the proportionate voting system representing the Nepali Congress party.  On Friday, according to sources at the President’s Office, Balen will be sworn-in as the prime minister during a special ceremony at the President’s Office, Sheetal Niwas. Sources close to Balen’s secretariat said he is likely to form a small cabinet with the number of ministers ranging between 15 to 18.

Balen, a rapper-turned-politician, defeated four-time prime minister K P Sharma Oli in the Jhapa-5 constituency, a long-standing stronghold of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), by a huge margin.

By securing more seats than the simple majority (138 seats), enough to form a government, the RSP is just two short of a two-thirds majority that is required in case his party wants to amend the constitution.

Balen and the RSP tsunami almost wiped out the traditional parties, with the Nepali Congress winning only 38 seats, followed by the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML) with 25, and the Nepali Communist Party getting only 17 seats.

 The Shram Sanskriti Party won seven seats and the Rastriya Prajatantra Party with five. One result has been withheld pending a court case.