KATHMANDU, Nepal

Voting began Thursday in Nepal to elect 275 members of the lower House of parliament, coming six months after Gen Z-led protests ousted the government of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli.

Elected in November 2022 for five years, the House of Representatives (HoR) was dissolved last September at the peak of mass protests led by members of the Gen Z generation.

The parliament building, office of the prime minister, Supreme Court and private business firms were burned down by demonstrators demanding an end to corruption and inequalities. More than 70 people died.

The unrest prompted Oli to resign and leading retired jurist Sushila Karki to take over as interim leader.

The Karki administration is holding elections within six months since she took office.

Around 19 million voters are eligible to elect 165 members of the HoR under the first-past-the-post electoral system. The other 110 lawmakers will be elected under the proportional representation category.

The upper house, known as the National Assembly, gets elected by the elected people’s representatives in the lower government and provincial assembly.

Of the total, more than 900,000 are first-time voters. They are supporting a young leadership to sideline aging and non-performing leaders.

The former mayor of the capital Kathmandu, Balendra Shah, is considered a frontrunner to be the new prime minister.

Balendra is a structural engineer by training. He had resigned from the mayor’s position to contest the election from Jhapa-5, the home constituency of Oli.