【By Observer Net Columnist Liang Danmei】

In September 2025, Nepal's national heart — Singha Durbar — was engulfed in flames. This century-old administrative palace, along with the parliament and supreme court, burned in the people's fire. Thousands of demonstrators, mostly young faces like the country itself, flooded the streets like a tide.

This political storm, quickly dubbed "Generation Z Protests" by the media, swept across the country at an unprecedented speed of the digital age. In the end, several ministers, including the Minister of Home Affairs, resigned, and Prime Minister Oli stepped down in disgrace.

The trigger for all this seemed to be just a routine administrative ban: the government, citing "failure to register on time," arbitrarily blocked 26 social platforms, including Facebook and YouTube. In any well-governed country, such an act would only cause a wave of public opinion. But in Nepal, which had long been simmering with grievances, it became the fatal spark that ignited the entire nation's powder keg.

However, attributing this upheaval simply to a technological regulatory policy would be a dangerous short-sightedness. The true root of the uprising lies deep within the gap between the Nepalese people's desire for development and the country's governance system.

The Paradox of Remittances

From the data, Nepal has made significant achievements in the past two decades. According to World Bank data, the country has nearly eradicated extreme poverty. The key economic pillar supporting this miracle is remittances.

These foreign currencies earned by millions of overseas laborers are indeed the lifeline of Nepal's economy. Data shows that over one-third (33.1%) of Nepal's GDP comes from individual remittances, a figure that has steadily risen over the past three decades, a staggering number that defines the country's economic structure.

Nepal before the unrest

However, the continuous flow of remittances acted as a powerful anesthetic, masking the structural decay that had already begun in the domestic economy. With a stable foreign currency, the government completely lost the urgency to push for reforms, no longer needing to focus on creating local employment, improving the business environment, or developing sustainable domestic industries. A vicious cycle was thus locked in: lack of domestic opportunities pushed generation after generation of youth abroad; their remittances, in turn, nurtured a ruling class that was unambitious and complacent.

The cruelest cost of this cycle was borne entirely by Nepal's younger generation. In 2024, the World Bank recorded a youth unemployment rate of 20.8%. High youth unemployment is a major catalyst for social instability. Once the government fails to ensure basic economic opportunities for the youth, widespread frustration and anger will quickly spread, directly threatening social order. We must recognize that this has long gone beyond the economic realm and has become a serious political and social challenge that must be taken seriously.

It was against this backdrop that the destructive power of the social media ban was instantly amplified. It was not just political censorship, but a deadly blow to the infrastructure that maintains the normal operation of the country. For millions of overseas laborers and their families at home, Facebook and WhatsApp were not entertainment, but important tools for maintaining family ties, coordinating finances, and alleviating the pain of transnational separation.

A single government order effectively cut off the emotional and economic connections of countless families. It did not attack virtual cyberspace, but the most real and fragile unit of Nepalese society. This indifference and violation of people's suffering ultimately ignited the people's anger.

The rot within the country

If the remittance economy is the brittle skeleton of Nepal, then systemic corruption is the cancer cell deeply rooted in the national economy. Public distrust of the government does not stem from temporary policy missteps, but from a collective despair toward the long-term, open, and unpunished plundering by the elite class.

In May 2023, prosecutors in Nepal filed corruption charges against 30 people, including two former cabinet ministers. This case involved forged documents that helped 875 Nepalese citizens enter the United States under the identity of Bhutanese refugees, with涉案金额 reaching millions of rupees.

The severity of this corruption outraged society. The shocking aspect of this case is that it fully revealed how corruption has systematically occupied the highest centers of state power. This is no longer just embezzlement, but a population crime led by the highest level of state power using the state machine. This undermined the very foundation of the country's legitimacy.

At the same time, while these grand scandals continue to erode public trust, social media has, in an unprecedented way, made the consequences of corruption tangible. Ordinary people may not understand a $105 million financial black hole, but they can immediately grasp what the luxurious lifestyle of "Nepo Kids" means.

On TikTok, videos of politicians' children showing off luxury cars, prestigious schools, and overseas vacations formed a cruel and heart-wrenching contrast with the over 20% youth unemployment rate in the country. On social media, the glaring contrast between privilege and poverty is spreading rapidly, intensifying the general anger towards corruption that stifles opportunities. This visual impact has turned previously vague social dissatisfaction into a clear collective consensus.

Therefore, when the government decided to block these platforms, the public saw it not as technical regulation, but as the corrupt elite class trying to suppress social dissent. This fatal decision caused serious consequences, not only failing to alleviate public discontent but also eroding the remaining credibility of the government, leaving its basis for legitimacy almost non-existent.

The destiny of national construction

To understand why Nepal is stuck in governance quagmire, we must trace back to the historical genes of its modern national construction. Nepal's predicament is not just a current governance failure, but a structural fate: a political system hastily implanted from the outside that is fundamentally incompatible with the country's complex and diverse social reality.

Nepal's modernization is a typical "transplantation history." Whether it is a constitutional monarchy or a federal republic, its constitutional framework, the core design of checks and balances, is almost a copy of Western and Indian templates, especially heavily influenced by the "Westminster model."

Nepal Parliament

The biggest problem with this institutional transplantation is that it completely ignores Nepal's social soil. The Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, with its "winner takes all" principle, is inevitably unsuitable in a country where political divisions are mainly based on identity, ethnicity, and region rather than ideology.

Therefore, a system copied without adaptation has not only failed to produce stable policy debates and power alternations, but has instead twisted politics into a zero-sum game over national resources. Being in power means distributing benefits to one's own faction and supporters; losing power means being completely excluded from the resource allocation system. This structural defect fundamentally determines the fickle nature of political alliances and the short-lived nature of governments. Since 2008, none of the 14 governments have completed their term, which is no coincidence.

Nepal's political chaos is not merely a failure of "rule by individuals," but an inevitable outcome of "institutional mismatch." The stage of the parliament plays out modern party politics, but the driving force behind it is pre-modern factional loyalty and interest exchanges. Such a state apparatus has destined Nepal's politics to be repeatedly unstable and continuously consumed by internal conflicts.

Conclusion: Rebuilding the Path After the Ashes

The storm in September 2025 was not an accidental political incident, but an inevitable display of systemic collapse. It dramatically exposed multiple structural fractures that had long existed in Nepal's national governance: an economy dependent on external infusions but hollowed out internally, a political class emptied by corruption and lacking credibility, and a national system that is seriously out of touch and continuously failing.

Nepal's future path is not about replacing a few new faces or waiting for the next international aid. What Nepal faces is a difficult "comprehensive reconstruction of national capacity." This means working to build a modern national governance system that is clean, efficient, open, and transparent. The core of this system lies in upholding the spirit of the rule of law, implementing accountability governance, and ultimately opening up broad space for the growth and development of the younger generation.

If Nepal's political elites cannot learn from this lesson of blood and fire and continue to ignore these deep-rooted problems, this protest will not be the last. History has already shown that suppressed public resentment will always find an outlet. The next time the powder keg is filled again, the trigger may not be a single ban, but the intensity and destructiveness of the eruption will certainly be even greater.

Nepal is standing at a crossroads in history. The path ahead is either a difficult rebirth or a cycle of fate, depending on the decision made at this moment.

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