KATHMANDU, Nepal — Nepal will elect an assembly today to write a new constitution putting an end to a decade of Maoist insurgency and possibly centuries of royal tradition.

The election is the final stage of a two-year peace process in which all the major parties in the turbulent country have proclaimed the birth of a “new Nepal.”

A republican majority in a coalition administration seems inevitable, and the monarchy is expected to be abolished.

“Right now it is the ‘new Nepal,'” King Gyanendra Shah’s household priest, Mahdev Bhattarai, said.

“Everything is new, everything should be new they say, but I think it is unnatural. The consequences of such ignorance will be seen in future.”

When Mr. Bhattarai was appointed royal priest in 2002, Nepal was the world’s only Hindu kingdom. Now it is a secular state. His anguish mirrors that of many conservatives in a traditional society on a collision course with rapid modernization. With the stakes so high the election campaign has been violent. A succession of small bombings in the last few days has been blamed on royalists.

The Maoist party has also been accused of attacking rivals and intimidating voters. A candidate from a centrist party was murdered Tuesday and yesterday police shot dead a man protesting at the killing.

Until 1950 Nepal was a medieval society. An uprising restored power to the Shah dynasty, but democracy was only fully established in 1990.

Thirteen thousand people have died in the fighting. The Maoists’ republican demands became popular after Mr. Gyanendra took charge of the government. The peace process began when a street movement in 2006 forced the king to relinquish his powers.