KATHMANDU, Nepal

Voting continued in Nepal on Thursday to elect 275 members of the lower House of parliament, after youth-led protests ousted the government of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli six months ago.

According to data shared by the Election Commission, the voter turnout from 7 am to 1 pm local time was recorded at 26%.

“More than 4.45 million voters have cast their votes till 1 pm (0715GMT,” said Narayan Prasad Bhattarai, the commission’s spokesperson.

Elected in November 2022 for five years, the House of Representatives was dissolved last September at the peak of mass protests.

The parliament building, the office of the prime minister, the 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 has been holding elections within six months since she took office.

Around 19 million voters are eligible to elect 165 members of the House of Representatives 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. The majority of them are supporting 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.