Something unprecedented has occurred in Nepal’s political history. The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) has won close to two-thirds of parliamentary seats, a feat without precedent under the current electoral system. The Nepali Congress (NC), CPN-UML and other political parties that have dominated since the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1990, have been relegated to the margins.

This victory of RSP is the response of a polity that had exhausted every other option.

The RSP’s ‘Citizen Contract’ (Nagarik Karar) treats the voter as an investor and the party as a debtor, liable for consequences if results are not delivered. In a polity long accustomed to theft, this is an innovative framing for Nepal’s political moment. But electoral rhetoric and institutional reality are separated by the immense distance of actual government performance. RSP has inherited a moribund economy, institutions that have been systematically captured and turned towards rent extraction, and accelerating geopolitical crises.

Nepal’s economy is sustained by what its people earn abroad and not by what it produces domestically. Remittances account for at least a quarter of national income, and more than $20 billion in foreign reserves is a migrant savings buffer; neither is evidence of a productive economy. The legacy political parties presided over this arrangement because it required the least effort while serving the deal-makers who funded them: An import-dependent fiscal architecture generated customs revenue and enriched a narrow trading elite. At the same time, industrialisation, infrastructure and domestic employment were neglected. To get economic governance right, contractors, intermediaries and rent-seekers must not be allowed to attach themselves to the incoming government.

Their overtures will perpetuate kleptocratic networks under fresh branding and undermine the electoral mandate for change. Resisting the overtures of Nepal’s kleptocratic network is the right and courageous economic governance choice. The incoming government must reorient fiscal policy toward incentivising domestic production, fix capital budget execution stuck at 63 percent, exit the FATF grey list before it chokes access to concessional finance, and build the institutional credibility required for transparent procurement, contract enforcement, and commercial adjudication, without which neither domestic nor foreign capital will flow into productive enterprise. The task is to govern the economy, not just to announce targets.

The electoral victory for RSP arrives at a global moment that makes governing Nepal more challenging than ever before. The rules-based international order that small, landlocked, aid-dependent states relied upon is fracturing. Tariff wars are reshaping global trade. Supply chains have become instruments and casualties of geopolitical manoeuvring. Great-power competition is compressing the strategic space available to countries caught between rival spheres of influence, and Nepal, situated between the world’s two most consequential economic powers, is vulnerable. This is why landlocked, energy and food-deficient, remittance-dependent Nepal must regard national security as fundamentally an economic question and place it at the centre of the governance agenda. Pursuing energy and food sovereignty, trade diversification, and resilient transit corridors are national security imperatives that require Nepal to immediately navigate great-power rivalry without becoming a proxy for any one side.

This requires a foreign policy apparatus capable of negotiating trade agreements, cross-border energy partnerships, and transit arrangements with strategic clarity, not the gesture politics and performative diplomacy that have characterised Nepal’s external engagement for decades. For Nepal, a secure state and a competitive economy are not separate objectives.

The Middle East crisis is a stark reminder of Nepal’s looming insecurity. An estimated 1.73 million Nepalis are currently working in the Gulf—roughly six percent of the population—and over 207,000 new workers departed for GCC countries in the first six months of this fiscal year alone. Any sustained disruption to the Gulf labour market threatens not just remittance flows but the livelihoods of millions of families and the macroeconomic stability those remittances underwrite. The exposure extends beyond labour: Nepal imports all of its petroleum through India, which itself sources significantly from the Middle East—petroleum products worth Rs 274 billion constituted the single largest import category last year, and any disruption to global energy supply chains transmits directly to Nepali fuel prices, transport costs, and the price of food on every household table. Nepal has no strategic petroleum reserves and no meaningful domestic fossil fuel production. Food security is similarly exposed: Nepal is a net food importer, dependent on cross-border supply chains only as resilient as the geopolitical order sustaining them. The RSP was elected because the state stopped working for its citizens. Decades of elite capture turned public institutions into instruments of private extraction; licensing became a revenue stream for political intermediaries; procurement served party loyalists rather than public need; and judicial appointments rewarded political affiliation over competence. The mandate thrust upon RSP is a desperate demand for a state that functions with care and consideration of all its citizens.

With a supermajority comes a particular danger: The concentration of power without accountability. Nepal’s legacy parties built complex extraction architecture over decades, using their fraternal organisations to capture state institutions from within. The RSP must resist reproducing this rent-seeking architecture. The surest way to betray the public trust is not through policy failure but through the stealthy establishment of new kleptocratic networks in reformist clothing. Therefore, the rhetoric of countering corruption must now be translated into the nitty-gritty work of forensically identifying and dismantling kleptocratic systems across state and society.

This moment is genuinely consequential for Nepal’s democratic transition as a small state amidst extraordinary geopolitical tumult. The combination of an overwhelming domestic political mandate for change with an increasingly chaotic international system requires not only governance capacity but also strategic patience. The electoral mandate is not a gift. It is a loan, and the interest is already due.