Prem Darshan Sapkota, Ujjwal Prajapati and Srishti Adhikari
Debates on the candidates’ profiles have dominated both mainstream and social media in the run up to the elections in Nepal. The upcoming election, announced on the heels of the September 2025 Gen Z protests, is different not just because the sitting parliament was yet to complete its five-year term but also because the narrative of old vs new has gripped the entire country. Youth and thereby representation by age group has become a major talking point and this has meant that the age group of the candidates have attracted major eyeballs. Furthermore, the narrative of the same old faces vs fresh ones has also dominated public conversations. Similarly, representation based on gender has been a major concern; the percentage of female first past the post candidates from political parties have barely hit double digits, with parties relying heavily on the proportional candidates list to reach the mandated 33 percent female representation in the parliament. In this context, we have presented a series of infographics with a comparative perspective on the candidates from the major four political parties in the 2017, 2022 and the upcoming 2026 elections.
Candidacy in the 25-35 age group category has remained consistently low except for the Rastriya Swatantra Party, (42 in 2022 and 35 in 2026 elections) This may be explained by their relatively recent entry in the national political arena. While the major bulk of candidates for Nepali Communist Party and the RSP fall within the 36-45 and 46-55 brackets, for the CPN-UML and the Nepali Congress, the majority of candidates have been from the 46-55 and 56-65 age category. Interestingly, overall, in the last two and the upcoming 2026 elections, over 50 percent of the candidates have been from the 36-55 age brackets. In terms of repeated candidates, the numbers have gone down significantly for the Nepali Congress and the Nepali Communist Party in the 2026 elections, while the CPN-UML has been quite consistent with 43 percent repeated candidates in the 2022 and the 2026 elections. With regards to gender, the gains in the number of female candidates contesting first-past-the -post seats have been painfully slow. In the 2026 elections, the percentage has finally reached double digits which at just 11 percent still leaves a lot of room for improvement.
