FEW HAVE NEGOTIATED Nepal’s politics as craftily or laid claim to a constituency as unyieldingly as Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli has. A former prime minister and the head of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), or CPN-UML, Oli has been elected from Jhapa district in eastern Nepal in all but one general election since 1991, when Nepal returned to multi-party democracy. His favoured stomping ground throughout has been what is now the Jhapa-5 constituency, formed in 2017 from parts of earlier constituencies where he had found favour. In the last general election in 2022, his margin of victory was more than 28,000 votes in a constituency where some 100,000 people cast ballots. Unlike many other aspirants, Oli did not have to pursue a door-to-door campaign. As the face of one of Nepal’s grand old parties for the past decade, and already by then a two-time prime minister, he addressed voters at mega-rallies and campaign gatherings. Oli didn’t go to voters; they came to him. Until now.
Nepal goes to the polls on 5 March for a snap election called after mass protests in September 2025 brought down an Oli-led government. Defying loud calls to relinquish party leadership and step aside for a new crop of leaders, he is contesting Jhapa-5 again. His primary competitor is Balendra Shah, the former rapper-turned-mayor of Kathmandu and now the projected prime ministerial candidate of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP). Shah and the RSP stormed onto the scene in 2022: Shah won a mayoral election as an unheralded independent and the RSP became the fourth-largest party in parliament just half a year after its formation, both tapping into popular anger against a corrupt and dysfunctional political establishment. Shah’s decision to fight Oli on his home turf has turned the contest in Jhapa-5 into the most symbolic and most closely watched of the 2026 election.
Oli can perhaps sense a change in the political winds. He has now resorted to door-to-door campaigning, listening meekly to his voters’ complaints and questions, and has issued a 35-point appeal explaining why he should be re-elected. Whereas in earlier elections he traversed the country to campaign for his party, now he has been largely confined to his own constituency. A shift in voter sentiment notwithstanding, what makes Oli’s position even more tenuous is the loss of an important alliance in Jhapa-5. The monarchists of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party, who had earlier voted for Oli en masse in exchange for CPN-UML support for their leader, Rajendra Lingden, in the Jhapa-3 constituency, have said they will not do so this time.
Outside observers may be surprised by an electoral alliance between a party demanding the return of a Hindu monarchy and a supposedly atheist, republican Communist party. Nepalis, however, will barely bat an eyelid. Under Oli’s leadership, mainstream Nepali Communism as represented by the CPN-UML – the largest component of the country’s Left – has shed more and more of its past progressivism, which was already a thing of many limits. Instead, the party has veered to the right to become a champion of conservatism in republican Nepal. Oli has presided over the CPN-UML’s most successful decade in Nepali politics, with the party rarely out of government. Yet the progressive gains Nepal has seen over this period have come despite the CPN-UML rather than because of it, and the party itself has moved farther and farther to the right.