Balendra Shah, widely known as Balen, was sworn in Friday as Nepal’s 43rd prime minister during a ceremony at the presidential residence in Shital Niwas.
President Ram Chandra Paudel administered the oath of office and secrecy to Shah. After taking the oath in line with Hindu and Buddhist traditions, Shah formally assumed office and announced a 15-member Cabinet.
The new Cabinet includes seven ministers under the age of 40, giving the government a notably younger profile than many of its predecessors.
With Shah now in office, attention will turn to the new government’s early decisions, Cabinet priorities and its approach to governing.
Shah’s rise to the premiership has been rapid. A structural engineer and former rapper, he first entered electoral politics in the 2022 local elections, when he won the Kathmandu mayoral race as an independent candidate.
He later resigned as mayor and joined the Rastriya Swatantra Party as a senior leader and the party’s candidate for prime minister. In the House of Representatives election held on March 5, Shah won from Jhapa-5, defeating former prime minister and CPN-UML chairman K.P. Sharma Oli by 49,614 votes.
That victory helped establish Shah as a major national political figure. His appointment as prime minister within about two and a half months of joining a political party marks an unusually fast rise in Nepal’s politics.
During his tenure as Kathmandu mayor, Shah also drew international attention and was included in TIME magazine’s list of influential emerging leaders. His path to national office, however, came during a period of political unrest. Following the Gen-Z movement and the developments that followed, he resigned from the mayor’s office on January 18 and moved into federal politics.
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