Nepal is once again standing at the edge of a constitutional cliff, and the ones kicking away the ground beneath its feet are the very politicians Gen Z chased out of power only months ago. The uprising was a generational verdict on a political class that had treated the state as personal property and the youth as expendable crowd fillers. Parliament burned, party offices were stormed, and symbols of authority were torn down because young Nepalis knew that only a jolt would dislodge the entrenched cartel that ran Kathmandu like a family business. Now, even before the next elections, the old faces are crawling back to the microphone. They have rediscovered their voice, if not their conscience. On cue, they have begun to mutter that they may not recognise the election results. This is not harmless political rhetoric; it is a rehearsal for sabotage. When these same men pre emptively question elections supervised by an interim administration born of that uprising, they are not defending democracy; they are scouting for an escape route from accountability. If this continues, Nepal's future narrows into three bleak possibilities. In the first, elections technically take place, but in the days before polling, party bosses denounce the process as a conspiracy and instruct their cadres to disrupt voting, intimidate young organisers, and manufacture just enough chaos to depress turnout. The result is the worst of all worlds: a low legitimacy parliament where the old guard loses seats yet gains a permanent excuse to boycott, obstruct and claim the new government lacks a mandate. In the second, the interim government, under pressure from the same discredited parties, begins to drape the word 'security' over its own nervousness and agrees to postpone elections until tempers 'cool'. But tempers do not cool in a battered economy; they boil. Add a rolling postponement of elections to that brew, and you get a wider, more bitter revolt, led not only by students and young professionals, but by returned migrants, unemployed workers and bankrupt small business owners who have finally had enough of Kathmandu's theatre. The third scenario is the most corrosive. Elections are held, a new coalition is formed, and the ousted parties simply refuse to recognise the government. They walk out of parliament, incite unrest in the provinces and drag every minor dispute into a judiciary whose own buildings have recently stood in the shadow of smoke and stones. At that point, the constitution ceases to be a social contract and becomes just another prop in a prolonged power struggle. All this plays out against an economic backdrop that no longer needs euphemisms. Ordinary Nepalis feel it every day. Growth forecasts have already been trimmed by prolonged instability, tourism has sagged, services have slowed, and yet again the country leans on remittances to keep the external account on life support. Rock bottom is a phrase analysts hesitate to use, but for many households, it has already arrived. When politicians in such a context casually float the idea of not accepting election results, they are not merely pressing against the floor; they are digging for a new depth of crisis. In healthier democracies, such a moment would trigger a firm reaction from a serious industrial class, worried not about the next tender but about the next decade. Nepal has no such luxury. The country does not have industrialists in any meaningful sense. Instead, it has a small circle of self styled 'business leaders' whose fortunes have grown not from building factories and exporting goods, but from flipping land, fixing contracts and operating on the shifting margins of the law. This class will not save the republic. It is an appendage of the very political order that brought Nepal to this point, not a counterweight to it. The panic that drives the old parties is therefore unrestrained by any serious domestic constituency for reform. The rise of the Rastriya Swatantra Party and the wider ecosystem of independent and anti establishment figures has begun to disrupt that comfortable script. RSP, in particular, has done something unforgivable in the eyes of the old parties. It has taken the moral energy of the Gen Z uprising and converted it into an electoral project. In parts of the country once treated as safe family estates, young workers and local organisers are quietly walking away from UML and Congress ward committees, drawn instead to newer forces that talk less about history and more about delivery. The interim government cannot afford to misread this moment. It was not granted its mandate by the grace of party elders; it inherited that mandate from bodies in the street and in the morgue. Its job is not to hover above the fray, issuing bland appeals for calm while the political class rehearses the script for the next crisis. There is nothing partisan about defending the basic premise that those who lose an election must accept the result. There is nothing excessive about stating, clearly and early, that parties which reject outcomes without credible evidence of fraud will face legal and political consequences. There is nothing unreasonable in ensuring that young first-time voters, who still carry the memory of bullets and batons, can cast their ballots without being harassed by the very forces they once confronted at barricades. The alternative is drearily familiar. The old parties like to remind Nepal that they once fought for democracy. It is a line they will surely repeat from every stage in the coming months. But the youth who brought down the last government will be listening with a different ear. They see a political generation that fought for democracy in its youth and now shrinks from it in old age. They see leaders who invoke sacrifice in one breath and threaten the ballot with the next. They look up to find that there is no industrial class to lean on, only well-connected traders and fixers scrambling for visas and favours. Nepal's tragedy is that it cannot afford another round of this regression. Its deeper tragedy is that its leaders seem determined to find out just how far below 'rock bottom' the country can still fall. Prof C.K. Peela is a geopolitical and security expert on South Asia and Asia Pacific.