The Buildings Fell, Then the Government: Why Nepal’s 2026 Landslide Was a Decade in the Making

KATHMANDU, May 10: In April 2015, I didn't just see the dust rising over Kathmandu; I smelled it. It was the smell of old brick, centuries of history, and more importantly- the cheap, sandy mortar that should never have been used in a schoolhouse.

As a structural engineer, my first instinct was to look at the joints and the rebar. But as I spent the next decade traveling through the ruins of Sindhupalchowk and Gorkha, I stopped looking at the buildings and started looking at the people. I saw thousands of young volunteers - students, engineers, and tech kids - doing the work the government simply wouldn't do.

Ten years later, those same kids have just finished what we started in the rubble. The landslide victory of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) in the March 2026 elections isn't just a political shift. It is the final realization of a generation that learned, in the hardest way possible, that if you want a structure to stand, you have to pour the foundation yourself.

The Day the "Old Guard" Cracked

Before 2015, we lived in a state of political stagnation. The same few men had been passing the prime minister’s chair back and forth for decades. They spoke about "revolution" while the country's infrastructure literally crumbled.

When the earthquake hit, the government's response was a masterclass in failure. They tried to centralize aid, creating a bottleneck that left families in tin sheds for years while billions in international funds sat in bank accounts. That was the "blessing in disguise." It broke the spell. It showed us that the men in power weren't just slow; they were irrelevant.

While the ministries argued over paperwork, we - the youth built parallel systems. We used social media to track supplies, drones to map damage, and collective labor to rebuild. We didn't know it then, but we were practicing how to run a country.

The Engineer Who Swiped Right on the System

The most visible result of this decade-long frustration is the rise of Balen Shah. For people in my profession, Balen isn’t just a "rapper-turned-politician." He is a peer-a structural engineer who looks at a city’s problems as technical "bugs" to be fixed rather than ideological battles to be fought.

His victory on March 5th in  Jhapa-5-the home turf of former Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli -was the final symbolic "stress test" for the old guard. By defeating a political titan by a margin of nearly 50,000 votes (68,348 to 18,734), Balen didn’t just win a seat, Nepal elections 2026: Balen defeats KP Sharma Oli; he proved that the slogans of the 1990s no longer carry weight.

With the RSP now holding 182 seats in the 275-member house, the mandate is clear: the people have finally chosen the engineer over the orator. They want a state that functions with the boring, reliable predictability of a well-engineered bridge. 

A New Foundation

The September 2025 "Gen Z" protests were the final push. When the government tried to ban 26 social media platforms to hide their own incompetence, they were trying to put a band-aid on a structural crack. You can't censor a generation that has already learned how to rebuild a village with their own hands.

The 2015 earthquake was a tragedy that broke our hearts, but it also cleared the ground. It took ten years to haul away the debris of the old political system, but the new structure we’re building is finally earthquake-proof.

Binay Karna, is a PhD Candidate-Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand