Nepal's 2026 election delivered its youngest and most female federal parliament yet. The new parliament is charged with the aspirations of the Gen Z movement and shaped by the rise of new parties. The candidate pool in Nepal’s elections has always been diverse. What changed in 2026 is that the votes and the seats finally caught up, though not along every dimension of diversity. Whether that catch-up lasts or fades with the movement that drove it, is far less certain.
Among the 165 directly elected (first-past-the-post, FPTP) representatives, the share of women more than doubled between 2017 and 2026, from 3.6 to 8.5 per cent—the sharpest rise yet, even though in numerical terms it is still only 14 of the 165 seats. The average age fell from 52.5 in 2017 to 45.1 in 2026. A full one-third of those elected in 2026 were under the age of 40, compared with only 6 per cent in 2017 and 4 per cent in 2022.
This demographic shift in the elected body was not rooted in a change in the field of candidates. Women made up 8 per cent of candidates in 2017, 9 per cent in 2022, and 11 per cent in 2026, and the share of those under the age of 40 held steady at 29, 29, and 28 per cent in those years. The candidate pool was already diverse and changed little across the three election cycles.
The diversity in the overall candidate pool, however, was not spread evenly across parties. The 2026 election drew in a wave of new parties, several emerging from or aligned with the Gen Z movement that preceded it. Candidates can, therefore, be grouped by party type. The 15 parties that drew the most votes in the 2017 federal election—such as the Nepali Congress, the UML, and the Maoist Centre—together with the parties they have since split into or merged with, are counted as traditional. All other parties are counted as new, including the Rastriya Swatantra Party and several that emerged or rose to prominence around the Gen Z protests. The rest are independent candidates. By 2026, these three types accounted for about a third of all candidates each, the new parties and independents having expanded to match the traditional ones.
Sorted this way, women were fielded at much the same rate in each type of party: in 2026, 11 per cent of traditional candidates, 10 per cent of new-party candidates, and 14 per cent among independents. Young candidates were not as evenly distributed. They were concentrated among the new parties and independents, where about 30 and 39 per cent, respectively, were under 40, while the traditional parties fielded just 13 per cent—down from 22 per cent in 2017.
What set the parties really apart though was less who they fielded than how differently their candidates fared at the polls—by gender and by age. In the traditional parties, there was a rising share of women candidates: 7 per cent in 2017, 9 in 2022, and 11 in 2026. Yet, they garnered a falling share of votes and seats: by 2026, the 11 per cent of female candidates drew only 5 per cent of the party’s votes and held 3 per cent of its seats. The new parties show no such gap in 2026: women drew votes and won seats at the same rate as men (Figure 1). Of the 14 women who won a direct seat, only one was from a traditional party and 13 from the new ones.
Figure 1: Vote and seat conversion by candidate gender and age, traditional versus new parties.
Age ran along the same grain. In the traditional parties, the votes went to candidates older than average of their candidate pool—three to five years older in every election cycle. The new parties ran the opposite way: the age of their 2026 candidates averaged 45 years while the votes and seats went to those younger still, around 43.
The gender and age gaps in candidate performance were rooted in candidate placement, set before a single vote was cast. For a candidate whose party had also contested the same constituency the last time, one can ask how that party had done there before—a rough measure of how winnable the seat was (Figure 2). In 2026, the traditional parties gave their women the tougher ones: the seats they put up women in had been lost, on average, by 36 percentage points, against 22 percentage points for the seats they gave men. Their young candidates fared the same, 32 percentage points against 22 for older candidates. And it was not just a young-versus-old split: in the traditional parties, the older the candidate, the safer the seat—a positive correlation across the whole field (0.230).
In contrast, in new parties women ran on seats no less winnable than those men were contesting in, and likewise for younger candidates. Both gaps were negligible: three percentage points in women's favour, and about two by age. And where age predicted a seat’s winnability in the traditional parties, in the new ones the correlation was effectively zero (0.007).
Figure 2: Seat winnability by candidate gender and age, traditional versus new parties
A simpler explanation may point to differences in candidate quality, that is, assuming the women and young candidates the traditional parties ran were simply weaker and lost on their merits. If we take education to be one indicator of the quality of candidates, the data says otherwise. In 2026, within both the traditional and the new parties, women held bachelor’s or higher degrees at much the same rate as men, and younger candidates as often as older. The difference lay in candidate placement, not in the candidates.
The parties that closed the gender and age gap widened a different one. Of the 13 women who won through the new parties in 2026, seven were Bahun–Chhetri—more than half, although Bahun–Chhetri candidates made up only a quarter of women candidates in the new parties. Among the 47 under-40 elected representatives from the new parties, 25 were Bahun–Chhetri although this group made up only a quarter of young candidates in these parties.
The same gap appears in conversion, the rate at which a group's share of candidates becomes a share of seats. Bahun–Chhetri candidates held a stable share of the field across all three elections—around 30 per cent—and were less concentrated among new party candidates than in the traditional ones. Yet in the new parties, the conversion gap by caste and ethnicity ran sharply against non-Bahun–Chhetri candidates: 77 per cent of candidates, 56 per cent of votes, 51 per cent of seats. In the traditional parties, non-Bahun–Chhetri candidates converted at roughly the rate they ran.
Whether this means that gender and age gains were only possible through Bahun–Chhetri dominance is the sharper question. The conversion data suggests otherwise (Figure 3). Within new parties, the Bahun–Chhetri advantage over non-Bahun–Chhetri candidates is nearly identical for young and older candidates—about 3.3 times the conversion rate in both cases. And among non-Bahun–Chhetri candidates alone, women converted at a higher rate than men, and under-40 candidates at a higher rate than older ones. The gender and age diversity in the new parliament is not a Bahun–Chhetri artefact—it exists among Bahun–Chhetri and non-Bahun–Chhetri candidates alike. What the new party wave produced was equitable placement by gender and age, inside a structure that favours Bahun–Chhetri candidates regardless of gender or age.
Figure 3: Conversion rate by candidate gender and age, within Bahun-Chhetri and non-Bahun-Chhetri groups, new parties.
Even so, the shift may be more fragile than it looks. Parliament is coming closer to the country's age profile at exactly the moment the voting population is ageing away from it. The average voter was 42 in 2017, 44 in 2022, and 46 in 2026, and the share of voters under 40 fell from half to 42 per cent over the same span. The ageing is driven largely by low registration among the young: 39 per cent of Nepalis under 40 were not on the voter rolls in 2026 (against near-universal registration among older cohorts). Had young citizens registered at the rate their elders do, they would make up more than half the electorate rather than the 42 per cent they do now. The young voters who would make this parliament's composition durable are not entering the rolls fast enough to anchor it.
Nor did a younger electorate produce the shift in the first place. The new parties, in fact, won their seats in constituencies with older electorates than those the traditional parties held: in 2026, voters under 40 made up 40 per cent of the electorate in new party seats, against 45 per cent in traditional party ones. The demographic turn in parliament was not pulled forward by any change in the electorate. It came from new parties displacing traditional ones, and distributing seats fairly among women and young candidates. That the same wave also deepened the Bahun–Chhetri dominance of parliament—their share of directly elected seats rising from 36 per cent in 2017 to 41 in 2022 and 46 in 2026—is a complication, not a contradiction. The gender and age gains were genuine, achieved among Bahun–Chhetri and non-Bahun–Chhetri candidates alike, but they arrived inside a structure that systematically favoured Bahun–Chhetri candidates over everyone else.
Which leaves the open question. Is equitable seat allocation by gender and age a structural feature of these new parties, or is it just the behaviour of parties young enough not to have accumulated networks of entrenched men to protect? Once they institutionalise—long records and seats to defend—do they begin gatekeeping like the incumbents they displaced? On the evidence so far, 2026 looks less like a turning point than a window: open for now, held open by which parties put diverse candidates in winnable seats rather than by any durable change in who votes. Whether the forces that opened that window for gender and age will eventually open it for caste and ethnicity, too, remains to be seen.
