When Balendra Shah was sworn in as Nepal’s prime minister on March 27, the image was almost impossibly cinematic. A 36-year-old structural engineer and former rapper, standing where four-time prime ministers and Maoist commanders had stood before him, promising to do things differently. His Rastriya Swatantra Party had just won 182 of 275 parliamentary seats—something Nepal had not seen since 1959. The message from the Nepali public was unmistakable: we are done with the old order.
The RSP has since worked hard to project a single, coherent image—a technocratic, performance-driven government that has broken decisively with Nepal's culture of corruption and cronyism. The 100-point governance reform agenda, the youth-heavy cabinet, the swift sacking of a minister who appointed his own wife to a public board—all of it feeds a narrative of competence and accountability.
But beneath that united front, something more complicated is happening. The RSP is not one political project. It is three—held together, for now, by the shared euphoria of a landslide victory and the mutual convenience of power. And to understand why this matters, it helps to reach for a framework that political scientists have spent the last two decades developing: the study of populism itself.
The meaning of populism
Populism has become one of the most overused and misunderstood words in political commentary. Used loosely, it is little more than an insult—a way of calling a politician reckless or demagogic. But scholars define it more precisely, and their definitions are useful here.
The most influential academic framework, developed by political theorists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser, describes populism as a ‘thin ideology’—a set of ideas that divides the world into two camps: a pure, virtuous ‘people’ and a corrupt ‘elite’. The populist leader claims to speak for the former against the latter. What makes populism ‘thin’ is that it can attach to almost any substantive political program. A left-wing party can be populist. So can a right-wing one. So can a technocrat. The ideology fills in the details; populism provides the structure.
Beyond this core definition, scholars have identified distinct varieties of populism that operate through different channels and appeal to different publics. Understanding Nepal's new government requires distinguishing between three of them—because Balen Shah, Rabi Lamichhane, and Sudan Gurung each embody one.
Balen Shah: The techno-populist
Political scientist Benjamin Moffitt, in his work on populism's global rise, identifies a variant he calls techno-populism—leaders who claim that the system's problem is not structural injustice but simple incompetence, and who position themselves as the capable outsider who can fix what the corrupt insiders broke. The appeal is neither left nor right. It is managerial. Think of it as: the people deserve better—and I know how to deliver it.
Balen Shah is the closest contemporary embodiment of this type in South Asia. A structural engineer by training, a rapper by creative instinct, he built his political reputation as Kathmandu's mayor by setting measurable targets for waste management and traffic, posting updates directly to 4m Facebook followers, and projecting an image of relentless competence unbendable to any party or patron. His 100-point governance agenda—with performance indicators for every ministry—is essentially techno-populism institutionalised.
His populism is also unusually broad in its geographic and ethnic reach. Unlike most Nepali politicians who build their base within a caste or regional bloc, he launched his national campaign from Janakpur, presenting himself as a ‘son of Madhes’, a symbolically charged move for a Kathmandu-born politician of Hill origin. He won support across communities—urban youth, women, diaspora Nepalis—in a way that consciously resists identity-based outbidding.
The risk embedded in this model is one that scholars have documented repeatedly. Moffitt and others note that techno-populist leaders, confident their mandate represents the direct will of the people, tend to grow impatient with the slow, contentious machinery of democratic institutions. Within weeks of taking office, Balen announced the abolition of party-affiliated trade unions in government bodies and the removal of political student unions from campuses, replacing them with non-partisan councils. Both are defended as anti-corruption reforms.
Critics counter that dismantling workers’ organisations and depoliticising student life weakens the intermediary structures that democracies depend on—a familiar early warning sign in the literature on democratic backsliding.
Rabi Lamichhane: The performative populist
Lamichhane fits a different and older archetype in the scholarly literature—what Moffitt calls spectacle populism and what Latin American political scientists have analysed as the caudillo variant: the charismatic outsider who channels public fury through theatrical confrontation, making the exposure and punishment of the corrupt elite the central act of his politics.
Lamichhane built his career on precisely this. As a television host, he made a name for himself by cornering officials on camera. He founded the RSP in 2022 as a vehicle for anti-corruption outrage and won 21 seats on his first attempt. His style is combative, moralistic, and deeply personalised—politics as a crusade with him as its protagonist.
The profound irony, of course, is that Lamichhane arrived at power trailing active embezzlement charges, multiple stints in pre-trial custody, and a documented record of using an earlier stint as Home Minister to pursue journalists who criticised him.
A leaked commission report on last September’s protest violence was conspicuously silent on episodes connected to his controversial prison break and the burning of media offices belonging to a publisher he had previously had arrested. As scholars of populism from Jan-Werner Müller to Nadia Urbinati have long observed, performative populism carries within it an authoritarian temptation: once the leader is the embodiment of the people’s will, scrutiny of the leader becomes, by definition, an attack on the people.
Lamichhane remains RSP chair and controls the party’s organisational machinery. He was widely expected to claim the Home Ministry—giving him oversight of Nepal’s police, intelligence services, and the very investigative institutions that might scrutinise his own legal exposure. In the event, the portfolio went to Sudan Gurung, reportedly over Lamichhane’s resistance.
Sudan Gurung: The movement populist
Sudan Gurung belongs to a third scholarly category—what researchers of the Global South, from Ernesto Laclau onwards, have analysed as movement populism or mobilisation populism: leaders who emerge not from established parties or media platforms but from the streets, whose authority derives from their claimed role as the authentic voice of an uprising rather than any formal mandate.
Gurung rose to national prominence by distributing water to protesters in September 2025, before becoming a central negotiator in the crisis—reportedly engaging directly with the army leadership in the days leading to Sushila Karki’s appointment as interim prime minister. His biography is one of civic mobilisation: earthquake relief volunteer, pandemic aid organiser, youth NGO founder. His populism speaks in the language of sacrifice and solidarity rather than competence or outrage.
But his conduct since taking the Home Ministry—one of Nepal’s most powerful portfolios—has generated immediate concern. Within hours of taking oath, Gurung personally went to police headquarters and, according to reports, effectively pressured the inspector general to arrest former prime minister KP Sharma Oli that same night.
The arrests may well be legally justified. But a senior commentator put the problem precisely in an op-ed: “The home minister himself releasing arrest warrants and posting updates on social media suggests political leadership stepping into police work.” This, the piece observed, risks casting doubt on the impartiality of investigations—and fits a pattern the scholar Mudde identifies as ‘democratic illiberalism’: popular legitimacy used to bypass institutional process.
Gurung’s own past contains unresolved ambiguities, newspapers have noted: questions about his proximity to the coordination of the September protests, his role in the violence that followed on the second day, and allegations about the opacity of relief funds managed through his NGO. None of these establishes wrongdoing. What they establish, as one commentator noted drily, are “ambiguities that have neither been publicly resolved nor institutionally interrogated before the conferral of one of the most sensitive offices in the state.”
Three populisms, one roof
These are not abstract typological differences. They translate directly into competing instincts on the most important governance questions Nepal now faces.
Accountability: Balen’s techno-populist agenda promises to investigate political figures going back to 1991. Lamichhane's legal exposure creates a structural incentive for the accountability drive to stop well short of RSP’s own leadership. The battle over the Home Ministry was the first visible expression of this tension—and it was resolved in Balen’s favor, for now, by installing Gurung rather than a Lamichhane loyalist. But Lamichhane retains the party chair and is not going anywhere.
Institutional process versus decisive action: Gurung’s movement-populist instincts—arrest warrants announced on Facebook, sleeping on a ministry sofa for public effect, personally dictating police operations—represent a governing style that deliberately prioritises visible decisiveness over procedural integrity. Balen’s agenda, by contrast, is built on systematic institutional reform. These two impulses, sharing a cabinet, will eventually collide.
The federalism question: The snap elections of March 2026 covered only the federal parliament; provincial assembly elections were deferred. For the Janajati and Madhesi communities whose political voice is most directly exercised at the provincial level, this is not a procedural footnote. It is an early signal about whether the RSP's promised ‘new Nepal’ actually includes the communities that Nepal's 2015 constitution was supposed to empower.
The paradox of the majority
Nepal’s previous governments were undone by coalition fragility. The RSP’s extraordinary majority was supposed to solve that. But here is the paradox: that majority removes the external pressure that might otherwise have forced internal coherence. When you must manage a five-party coalition, you are compelled to articulate shared ground in explicit terms. When you hold 66 percent of parliament yourself, you can defer internal contradictions indefinitely—until they detonate.
Three types of populism can, in theory, complement each other. A government that delivers results, holds corrupt elites accountable, and genuinely includes the previously marginalised would be a formidable and legitimate political force. But that outcome requires more than a seven-point power-sharing agreement and a 100-point to-do list. It requires a shared theory of the state—an agreed answer to who governs, for whom, through what institutions, and constrained by what rules.
That the RSP does not yet have. What the next twelve months reveal about whether Lamichhane’s cases are quietly buried, whether Gurung’s decisiveness respects institutional boundaries, and whether Balen’s reform agenda survives contact with his own party will tell us whether Nepal has produced a genuine rupture—or simply replaced one set of elites with another, newer, and for the moment more popular set.
The author is a PhD candidate at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also a life member of the Delhi-based International Centre for Peace Studies
