World Tour: Democracy under strain

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on the World and Everything in It: World Tour.

Nepal is electing new leaders today after deadly protests six months ago culminated with the resignation of the Prime Minister.

Citizens want a new start for the country, but change may be slow to come. WORLD’s Mary Muncy has the story.

MARY MUNCY: Today, former Nepal Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is trying to get his job back.

Oli resigned in September after young Nepalese people organized several huge protests over government corruption. They turned violent, and police killed 19 protesters. Hundreds of others were injured.

Now, voters in the country of 30 million are deciding who will fill the 275 seats in the member assembly. Over 3000 people are running. Some other elections have seen tens of thousands of candidates.

Challenging the former Prime Minister are the Nepali Congress party’s Gagan Thapa, and Balendra Shah, who served most recently as the mayor of the capital city of Kathmandu.

SHAH: [Nepali] Our agenda is that the poor people who have no money in their pockets should get a full education. The poor people with empty pockets should get access to the health facilities.

Shah says he wants to help poor people get an education and healthcare. He also wants to focus on job and technology growth. About 20 percent of the population lives in poverty. Shah believes corruption in government is to blame.

Shah, at 35-years-old, is relatively young, and his party is relatively new.

And that may be what some voters want.

SHARMA: Nepali people have largely been accommodative of any new force.

Santosh Sharma Poudel is the co-founder of the Nepal Institute for Policy Research in Kathmandu. He says corruption has been a problem at all levels of government for decades and each new party brings new hope.

He says there’s currently high-level policy corruption—like officials changing electric vehicle policies to suit their business interests.

SHARMA: The bureaucrats or the politicians who barely had a good suit to start with when they started their political career now roam around in cars that cost millions.

There’s also low-level corruption that affects people at home— exorbitant fees to register a new baby or unexplained delays in building permits.

Sharma’s research institute did a survey of what Gen Z expects going forward.

SHARMA: We asked them, ‘What was the major issue that we are facing?’ Almost three quarters of them pointed at the political system, so they have very low trust on the institutions themselves.

Candidates in this election have been touting their plans for rebuilding trust in the government, but so far, it’s unclear exactly how they’re going to implement them.

Right now, there are a few new voting reforms in place—things like transparency rules for campaign donations. But the mechanisms for enforcement remain weak.

For today’s election, the country deployed 300,000 additional security troops. Sharma says that isn’t unheard of, and it's likely there will be attempts at election fraud.

SHARMA: But I don't expect it to happen to a level whereby the whole election result is contested.

Sharma says the system needs to be gutted and rebuilt, but worries voters’ attention span may be too short for that.

Nepal also sits between and trades with China and India. Both of those countries, along with the United States, see Nepal as a security concern.

With outside actors interested in the elections and the country’s future, there are some reports of those forces stirring unrest, and influencing Gen Z through social media. But Sharma thinks the country would have gotten here, regardless.

SHARMA: My response is, so the kind of frustration we are feeling were not real? Or the lack of economic growth we had for the last 30 years was not real? or the number of people living in Nepal seeking some livelihood in harsh conditions, that's not real?

Sharma blames leaders and the political structure. He says lasting change will take time.

At a rally for Shah, one young voter says she’s tired of the old leaders.

BHUJEL: [Nepali] We have seen enough of the old leaders, they say one thing and do another, and are deceptive by nature. Now, the youth should move beyond this mindset and bring some change, even if it cannot be drastic.

She says they are “deceptive by nature” and the youth should try to bring change… even if those changes aren’t “drastic.”

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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