Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) leader Balendra Shah will be sworn in as Prime Minister of Nepal today. The swearing-in ceremony will be held at the President’s Office in Sheetal Niwas in Kathmandu at 12:34 pm local time. Balendra Shah was elected as the leader of the RSP Parliamentary party yesterday, paving his way to become Nepal’s youngest elected prime minister. His party, RSP, secured a landslide victory in the March 5 parliamentary poll.
The 35-year-old rapper-turned-politician will also be the first person from the Madhes region to hold the top executive post in the country. Nepal chose former Kathmandu mayor Balendra Shah, popularly known 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 of 275 seats in the House of Representatives. Of the 275 members of the House of Representatives, 165 are elected through direct voting and 110 through proportionate voting.
Balen defeated four-time prime minister K P Sharma Oli in Jhapa-5 constituency, a long-standing stronghold of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), by a huge margin.
