Gen-Z uprising and legitimation crisis of political actors in Nepal

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Youth Politics (Table 3)

Abstract

This paper engages with emergence of Gen-Z as a decisive political force in Nepal after the September 2025 youth uprising. This uprising displays an existential threat to the traditional political actors leading to legitimation crisis of the democratic regime. Its immediate cause was government’s decision to shut down several social media platforms including Facebook and X on 4 September. This decision intensified the youths’ mobilisation through alternate platforms like Discord resulting in a mass protest. Despite addressing the youths’ protest peacefully, the government responded with violent repression. The repression led to dozens of deaths, injuries, property damage, and eventually collapse of the government and state security exposing Nepal’s fragile political order and widening disconnection between political actors and younger generation. Although the changes brought by broader political trajectory since the 1990s promised inclusion, accountability, and prosperity, many youths continue to experience corruption, nepotism, patronage politics, and limited opportunities.

This paper dwells on Mannheim’s theory of generations, Habermas’s concept of legitimation crisis, and Weber’s construction of authority to explore the intricacies of how deteriorating mass loyalty undermines political legitimacy of the regime. Using qualitative analysis of social media content, and public discourse, this paper argues that Gen-Z is not merely protesting particular policies but questioning moral foundations of rule by the kleptocratic and kakistocratic leaders. Gen-Z narratives of stolen merit, captured democracy, and elite privilege demonstrate not temporary dissatisfaction, but a generational withdrawal of loyalty to the traditional political actors wrapped by nepotism, corruption scandals, factionalism and political favouritism. The paper concludes that the future of Nepal’s democracy will rely on whether the regime can earn rather loyalty, and whether legitimacy can be rebuilt in ways that the country’s priorities align with the needs and aspirations of the generation raised in a digital, transborder, and post-materialist public sphere.

Author

• Krishna Prasad Pandey, Purbanchal University