The burden of trust: RSP’s challenges

Members of the Rastriya Swatantra Party are young, educated, and driven, which is good but not enough.

The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) is going to the Parliament with 20 seats, which is a significant achievement for a party registered less than six months before the election. It got there by encroaching on the vote banks of all three major parties: The Nepali Congress (NC), the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre). The NC's and the UML's proportional votes were nearly 15 percent less than in 2017; the Maoists beat the RSP by barely 40,000 votes. The older parties mocked the RSP's success as a "flash in the pan".