From Nepal to Bangladesh and Hong Kong, young people across Asia have shaken and even toppled their governments. But do youth-led protests deliver lasting change? DW examines 11 years of protest movements and their impacts.
00:002025, the year of Gen Z activism, from the Philippines, to Morocco, Madagascar, and Mexico.
00:14Young protesters, they start to recognize each other's concerns and each other's language and the worries that they all share.
00:22If young people don't see a secure future, there is going to be much more despair.
00:28Looking at Asia, today's youth movements echo patterns we have seen in recent years, and even further back.
00:39What do Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have in common?
00:42Youth-led protest movements in these South Asian countries have toppled governments one after the other.
00:47Nepal in 2025, Bangladesh in 2024, and Sri Lanka in 2022.
00:53These were driven to a large part by younger people that were not seeking political change.
01:00They were seeking better lives.
01:02Meenakshi Ganguly is the deputy director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch.
01:06The reason that it turned into a demand for resignations quite often was when the government acted in a way that led to human rights violations.
01:17So we are also recognizing that when there are these authoritarian governments, and if the public becomes very, very angry, then it is very hard to control that kind of crowd.
01:30In Nepal, the protests were triggered by a social media ban, in Bangladesh, by government job quotas, and in Sri Lanka, by an economic crisis.
01:38These political leaders need to hold themselves to account for failing their citizenry, for failing the younger population that is looking towards their future, and is worried about jobs, about employment, about cost of living, about the climate, about so many different issues that are of pressing interest to younger people.
01:55Thousands of kilometers away in Indonesia, similar scenes unfolded.
02:01Weeks before Gen Z protests exploded in Nepal, Indonesians took to the streets in August 2025 to voice their anger at lavish perks for government officials.
02:11Unlike Nepal, Indonesia's protests did not force a change in leadership, but President Prabowo Subianto did roll back some government perks.
02:19DPR announced that the DPR RI will be recorded by several policies of the DPR RI, including the large requirements of the DPR RI, and also the moratorium for working work.
02:37Government concessions that we saw in Indonesia, which of course was very symbolic and very minimal.
02:44Dr. Yatun Sastramijaya is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.
02:49Like, okay, let's retract those housing bonuses, let's reshuffle the cabinet, and fire the most problematic or the most unpopular MPs, and then the problem is solved.
02:59The August protests didn't come out of nowhere.
03:02In February 2025, for example, there was a nationwide movement called Indonesia Gelap, or Dark Indonesia, against austerity measures.
03:10And then in March, there were more protests after Indonesia's parliament passed revisions to the country's military law, which allocates more civilian posts for military officers.
03:20So if you look at all these protests together as one bigger wave that is formed by all these smaller waves, you see that the underlying issues are so closely related, and none of them are solved, actually.
03:31Dr. Sastramijaya told EW that young people will return to the streets as long as the structural issues are not resolved.
03:38The latest waves of protests feel familiar.
03:42Asia's youth have been here before.
03:44In 2014, yellow umbrellas filled the streets of Hong Kong as protesters demanded the right to choose their own leaders.
03:51Protests erupted again in 2019, this time against a plan to allow extraditions to mainland China.
03:57While the extradition bill was eventually withdrawn, Beijing later imposed a sweeping national security law in response to the protests.
04:05The National Security Law is actually not a legal thing, but a political tool for the regime, for the government to suppress political dissidents.
04:22An additional security law called Article 23 further tightened restrictions.
04:28Fast forward to December 2025, and Hong Kong's last major opposition party was dissolved.
04:34If you mix pro-democracy agenda with state sovereignty agenda, things get really messy.
04:42Dr. Janjira Sambap-Punsiri is a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg, and an assistant professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
04:52The likelihood of a protest movement to succeed will decline, because it has to do with security issues.
05:00In Thailand, young people also demanded changes to the country's entrenched power structures.
05:06Thai youth even dared to call for reform of the powerful monarchy, an issue that once would have been unthinkable to raise in public.
05:13Dr. Janjira Sambap-Punsiri is an issue that is the state of the government, which is not the state of the government.
05:23Dr. Janjira Sambap-Punsiri is an issue that is not the state of the government.
05:25But that pro-democracy movement has also waned.
05:28Human rights lawyer Anon Nampa, the first person to publicly call for reform of the monarchy, is languishing in prison.
05:34As of July 2025, his cumulative sentence is more than 29 years.
05:39I wouldn't say that the movement failed completely. Thailand has come quite far from the moment when there was almost no challenge to the old elites.
05:56What about the protests that brought down governments? Are the gains only short term?
06:01So, in terms of structural political changes, you know, we very rarely in history see an immediate result from youth-led movements.
06:10If a movement gains support from the broad-based pillars of society, then the change tends to be more sustainable.
06:20In Sri Lanka, one family, the Rajapaksas, had dominated politics for decades.
06:26The Aragalia movement in 2022 forced them out.
06:35Two years later, Anura Kumara Disanayake was elected president.
06:39He campaigned on promises of tough anti-corruption measures and good governance.
06:43Sri Lanka's entire protest was also because of terrible economic policies that benefited the rich.
06:49A new government has now come in, elected on the promise of that kind of social justice, and they are making some steps.
06:56But they are, of course, limited by the fact that there is a financial crisis in the country.
07:02While there is progress in Sri Lanka, experts also say many of the promised democratic reforms remain unfulfilled.
07:08For instance, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, a law that was used repeatedly to detain people without charge for months, years, this law has still not been repealed.
07:21In Bangladesh, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus was sworn in as interim leader after Sheikh Hasina's 15-year rule came to an abrupt end.
07:33But more than a year and a half later, some have criticized the Yunus-led interim government for not doing enough on human rights reforms.
07:40And some of the problems that we had noticed earlier under the authoritarian government of Sheikh Hasina have been replicated, including, for instance, the arbitrary arrests of people that are considered opponents.
07:52While her government had targeted her political opponents, the interim government has failed to protect people who are being arbitrarily arrested because they are seen to be suspected loyalists of the now deposed Hasina government.
08:05In February 2026, Bangladesh will choose its new leader, the country's first votes since the student-led uprising that ousted Hasina.
08:15We are a very proud citizen of our servants who will see how to come to the freedom of the people and soon as possible.
08:22We are proud to have our own servants who are seeing all the leaders and the needs of the family.
08:27We are a proud citizen of the Ming provocations who is all of the migrants.
08:34Nepal will also head to the polls in March for elections that will test youth-led street energy.
08:40The democratic future of a country obviously does not depend on social movements
08:45or youth movements or any kind of movements alone. This has to do with the whole constellation in
08:49power and how far they're willing to concede to demands for democratization, you know, coming
08:56from the ground. If a country is an entrenched autocracy, then uprooting that and trying
09:03to transform a country to a fully functioning democracy will take decades, if not a generation.
09:13While the triggers for protest movements across Asia differ, the underlying cause is similar.
09:18Young people demanding political and social change. But such structural reforms take time.
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