There is excitement about the impending elections scheduled for March 5 next year. These polls will be the electoral debut of many new political parties that have risen in the aftermath of the Gen Z revolt. Competing against them will be more established outfits like the Nepali Congress, the CPN-UML and or even the Nepali Communist Party (that has been minted after combining various older communist parties). Have these oldish parties been totally discredited, or does the electorate still trust them? Can the newer outfits challenge the organisational might of the Congress or the UML? Will most of the tried and tested leaders be voted out? It’s all up in the air. Yet even amid the excitement—as also evident in the enthusiasm with which people are enrolling to vote—there remains a modicum of doubt about timely elections.

As of this writing the Congress and the UML, the two biggest parties in the erstwhile parliament, are yet to decide to take part in elections. The UML remains adamant that the only way forward is reinstatement of the dissolved house, not elections. Now, even the leaders tied to the establishment faction of the Congress seem to subscribe to this view. This is not surprising because if there are radical reforms in their respective parties today, these leaders might not even get to contest elections. Also, party chiefs Sher Bahadur Deuba (the Congress) and KP Sharma Oli (the UML) consider it a personal affront to take part in the polls being conducted by a regime that ousted them from power. That is one side of the story. The other side is that the government of Sushila Karki, formed with the sole mandate of holding timely elections, has also been rather reluctant to reach out to these parties and persuade them to take part in the polls.

The old forces as well as the new ones that arose after the Gen Z movement are choosing to put personal calculations and grudges before national interest. There cannot be meaningful elections without the participation of the Congress or the UML. Yet their path to participation in the polls is far from clear. There will also be plenty of potential spoilers who would want to benefit from the prolongation of the current state of political uncertainty. But we would like to believe that someone of the ex-chief justice Karki’s moral authority takes her sole mandate as the executive head seriously.

What is also noteworthy is that Nepal’s international friends—particularly India, China and the US—also seem to be in favour of timely elections, perhaps as they calculate that continued political instability in Nepal will harm their own interests. Yet that is not enough. For there to be timely elections, there must first be sustained pressure, from inside the country, on the government, the new post-Gen Z forces as well as the old parties to go to the polls. The authoritarian forces are waiting in the wings. Given the volatile nature of today’s South Asian geopolitics, in a state of continued political chaos, there is bound to be greater external meddling too. The pro-democracy forces old and new must again be made to realise that democracy in Nepal will come under increasingly greater threat the longer the polls are held off.