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Nepalese Gen Z protesters in front of Bharatpur mahanagarpalika office (September 2025). © हिमाल सुवेदी / Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License / Free for use / Wikimedia Commons

Recent protests in Nepal, widely labelled as “Gen Z protests” against a government-imposed social media ban, have been framed in much of EU/Western media primarily as a youth uprising for digital freedom. This framing misses the deeper drivers of unrest: entrenched corruption, economic inequality, and nepotism within Nepal’s political and economic elite.

In early September 2025, Nepal’s government banned 26 major social media platforms, citing “unregistered operations” and the spread of “misinformation”. The move acted as a trigger for mass demonstrations, led primarily by young people who rapidly expanded the protests beyond Kathmandu. Security forces responded with harsh crackdowns, resulting in at least 19 deaths and hundreds of injuries. While the ban was the immediate catalyst, the demonstrations were fuelled by much deeper grievances: entrenched nepotism that allows the children of political and business elites to dominate state institutions and limit upward mobility; widespread corruption and impunity that enable elite enrichment at the expense of ordinary citizens; persistent unemployment and inequality that leave young Nepalis with few viable opportunities at home, forcing many to migrate or remain trapped in frustration. The youth unemployment rate stood at approximately 20.8 percent in 2024, and the informal sector continues to dominate Nepal’s labor market, employing about 84.6 percent of workers, and 90.5 percent of women, in informal jobs. These dynamics perpetuate economic precarity and deepen youth disenchantment with the political establishment.

Framing the Protests: Digital Rights or Systemic Grievances?

A meaningful policy response must go beyond defending freedom of expression and address the systemic inequities and governance failures that fuel unrest in Nepal. This requires context-based and inclusive reporting, including the need for international coverage and policy analyses which are grounded in local perspectives rather than filtered primarily through Western narratives. Several experts have noted that foreign coverage of Nepal and South Asia often privileges international wire services over domestic journalism, leading to gaps in context and nuance. To correct this imbalance, EU institutions and global media networks should actively collaborate with Nepali journalists, editors, and civil society organizations to ensure that reporting reflects lived realities across class, gender, and regional divides, not only the perspectives of urban elites or youth influencers. This aligns with broader international calls for “decolonizing global media narratives” and prioritizing local voices in crisis reporting, as emphasized by UNESCO’s World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development 2024 report.

For many young Nepalis, the “nepo baby” label symbolizes a broader crisis of meritocracy and governance. Protesters argue that when power remains within a small circle of political families, opportunities for ordinary citizens, no matter how skilled or educated, are systematically restricted. This resentment, amplified through social media, turned “nepo babies” into both a rallying cry and a cultural critique of elite privilege. Here, the critique is not about celebrity children, but about the sons and daughters of politicians, ministers, and business magnates who have inherited positions of influence within parties and state institutions. The issue thus extends beyond personal inheritance; it reflects a national frustration with how political power is passed down like property, eroding public trust and deepening the sense of generational injustice.

While a small segment of Nepal’s population enjoys concentrated wealth and access to power, the vast majority face an increasingly harsh economic reality. The country’s elite, often connected to long-standing political or business families, control disproportionate shares of land, capital, and policymaking influence. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens, particularly young people, struggle with limited opportunities and rising living costs. According to the World Bank, nearly one in five Nepalis aged 15–24 is unemployed, while the country’s GDP per capita stands at just US $1,447. This economic stagnation has deepened inequality in Nepal: according to the Fighting Inequality in Nepal report, the richest 10% of Nepalis now earn more than three times the income of the poorest 40%, and in terms of wealth, the top 10% hold over 26 times more than the bottom 40%.

What started off as a digital rights issue quickly evolved into a nationwide movement against political corruption, inequality, and elite dominance. As thousands of young people took to the streets from Kathmandu to Pokhara, the demonstrations transformed into a broader rejection of the country’s entrenched power structures and the persistent exclusion of ordinary citizens from political and economic opportunity. Protesters demanded that Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli resign and that the Nepali government establish an independent anti-corruption watchdog, demands that reflected deeper institutional failures that have plagued the nation for decades. The calls for Oli’s resignation symbolised outrage at his government’s heavy-handed crackdown, which left at least 19 protesters dead and dozens injured. Meanwhile, the push for an independent corruption-monitoring body addressed widespread frustration with existing oversight institutions. At its core, the movement was not about internet freedom alone, but about systemic injustice. The protests were thus a culmination of years of dissatisfaction with slow economic growth, generational unemployment, and elite capture of state institutions.

Many observers have criticized how Western and regional media initially portrayed the unrest as a narrow struggle for digital freedom, ignoring the deeper social and political frustrations driving it. Journalist Swe Raut explained that early coverage “mostly reported it as a ‘social media ban protest’ before backlash forced more nuanced reporting”. Similarly, geo-strategist Brahma Chellaney warned that Western outlets were romanticizing the protests while concealing the real drivers, power struggles, economic stress, and cynical opportunism, reflecting what he called a persistent double standard in how unrest abroad is portrayed compared with at home. Nonetheless, Western and EU coverage largely framed the 2025 protests as a “Gen Z revolt” for digital freedom, emphasizing youth culture, hashtags, and online activism, while overlooking deeper grievances rooted in corruption, nepotism, elite capture, and youth unemployment. By focusing on internet access, these narratives downplayed the material conditions fuelling discontent: the pervasive influence of “nepo baby” elites, unequal access to power, and limited economic opportunities for ordinary citizens. Reliance on wire services and limited engagement with local journalists and civil society actors further eroded context and nuance. Local reporting has continuously documented how entrenched elite networks control appointments, contracts, and resources, leaving young Nepalis frustrated and politically marginalized. By not centring these insights, international coverage risked simplifying the movement into a digital-rights story rather than a broader call for accountability, equity, and systemic reform.

This pattern of misrepresentation reflects a broader structural bias in Western media reporting on the Global South, where protests are often simplified into themes familiar to Western audiences (internet freedom, youth culture, democracy vs. censorship) rather than situated within the specific political, economic and historical trajectories of the concerned societies. It also affects the EU’s policy discourse: When EU narratives prioritize digital rights over deep-rooted governance failures, international support and diplomatic interventions risk overlooking the systemic corruption and elite dominance that fuel political instability. Balanced, context-rich reporting, drawing on Nepali civil society, local media, and diverse youth voices, is therefore essential for shaping accurate international understanding and effective policy engagement with Nepal’s evolving political crisis.

The misrepresentation of Nepal’s 2025 protests, both domestically and internationally, carries profound political, social, and regional consequences. At the domestic level, the western-driven oversimplified portrayal of the demonstrations as a youth-driven reaction to a social media ban risks delegitimizing the protesters’ core grievances about corruption, nepotism, and systemic exclusion, thus eroding its core grievances. Such framing allows entrenched political and economic elites to dismiss the movement as a fleeting generational trend rather than a broad-based call for structural reform and equality. Internationally, the narrative focus by European and Western media on digital freedom and “Gen Z activism” can skew policy responses, encouraging external partners to champion internet rights while neglecting deeper governance and accountability reforms. This selective attention limits the scope of diplomatic engagement, aid conditionality, and policy interventions that could otherwise support long-term institutional change.

Local Turmoil but Regional Consequences

At the regional level, the implications are particularly significant. Nepal’s political instability reverberates across South Asia, a region already grappling with fragile democracies, elite capture, and high youth unemployment. Nepal’s example can become the kindling that spreads like wildfire, something we are starting to see in more and more countries recently. Continued national governance failures could exacerbate migration pressures, as young Nepalis, disillusioned with domestic politics and limited economic prospects, seek opportunities abroad, influencing labor markets in India, the Gulf states, and beyond. An estimated 600,000–700,000 Nepalis are projected to leave annually by 2030. This emigration also has profound consequences for Nepalese society, including the loss of skilled labor, disruption of local communities, and social and emotional strains on families left behind, further compounding domestic economic and social challenges. Although remittances play a crucial role in Nepal’s economy, accounting for approximately 26.6% of the country’s GDP in 2023, this reliance on remittances underscores a structural issue: the lack of sufficient domestic employment opportunities. The migration of youth not only affects Nepal’s labor market but also has broader implications for regional stability, influencing labor dynamics in neighbouring countries. Addressing these challenges requires comprehensive reforms that tackle corruption, improve governance, and create sustainable economic opportunities to mitigate the pressures driving youth migration, as it became clear during the protests.

The crisis also risks undermining public faith in democratic institutions across neighbouring countries, where similar frustrations with corruption and dynastic politics persist. Moreover, prolonged unrest in Nepal could create openings for geopolitical competition between India and China, both of which have strategic and economic interests in Nepal’s stability. This dynamic could transform an internal governance crisis into a regional security concern, complicating cooperation on trade, climate adaptation, and migration management.

Addressing these risks requires a shift in both domestic governance and international perception. Nepali authorities must move beyond cosmetic reforms to tackle entrenched corruption, elite privilege, and inequality, while EU and Western actors should adopt a more context-sensitive approach that situates youth mobilization within the country’s broader struggle for justice and accountability. Only through accurate representation and genuine reform can Nepal, and the region, avoid the deepening cycles of inequality, instability, and democratic fatigue now threatening South Asia’s future.

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