With just two percent of votes left to be counted on Wednesday following Nepal’s parliamentary elections, rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah’s centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) had already secured a majority.
The 35-year-old’s rise from mayor of the capital to the country’s expected prime minister marks a bold political leap and one of the most striking outcomes in Nepal’s recent political history.
The March 5 parliamentary election was the first since youth-led anti-corruption protests in September, which turned deadly and forced the government from power.
Shah also defeated veteran four-time prime minister KP Sharma Oli — whose Marxist-led administration was ousted during last year’s unrest — in his own constituency.
During the campaign, videos of Nepalis imitating Shah’s dance moves circulated widely on social media.
Voters were electing a new 275-member House of Representatives, the lower chamber of parliament, with 165 members chosen through direct elections and 110 through proportional representation.
In the direct contests, RSP won 125 of the 165 seats, about three-quarters of the total, according to official results.
In the proportional representation vote, the party also led the field, securing nearly half of the ballots counted so far, with just over 200,000 votes still outstanding.
“We are close to finishing the counting now,” Election Commission spokesman Narayan Prasad Bhattarai told AFP. “We will have the final number of PR seats soon.”
If final results reflect the current tally, RSP will have secured a landslide victory, a likely total of around 176 seats, just short of the 183 needed for a supermajority.
The calibration of final seat allocations may differ from the exact percentage if votes for small parties that did not make the threshold to win a seat are not included.
Constitutional law expert Bipin Adhikari said it might still take more than a week for Nepal to get a new prime minister.
“Once the commission submits its report to the president, he will call on RSP lawmakers to name the prime ministerial candidate,” Adhikari, a professor at Kathmandu University, said. “Only after that will his appointment take place.”
Nepali Congress, the biggest party in the last parliament, secured 18 seats in direct elections, and the Marxists of now-defeated Oli won nine.