‘Bangladesh will be better’: BNP victory puts nation at crossroads | Elections
As rickshaw puller Anwar Pagla turned into the road leading to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) office in Gulshan, Dhaka, on the afternoon after the parliamentary election, a small commotion stirred. His rickshaw had a Bangladeshi flag fixed to one side of the hood and the BNP’s flag to the other. Pagla is an ardent supporter.
“They call me mad because I consider this party everything in my life. But it doesn’t matter. We have won and Bangladesh will now be better,” he told Al Jazeera.
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Nearly two decades after it last governed, the BNP returned to power after a landslide victory in Thursday’s parliamentary election.
The Election Commission published the gazette of the members of parliament elected, a final official seal on the election process, on Saturday. The centre-right BNP’s alliance secured 212 of the 300 seats. The alliance led by its main rival, the Jamaat-e-Islami – Bangladesh’s largest religion-based party – secured 77.
Those elections came a year and a half after a nationwide protest movement ousted the country’s former leadership and saw 1,400 people killed in the streets. Bangladesh has been led by a caretaker government since Sheikh Hasina, who led the crackdown, fled the country.
The BNP’s Tarique Rahman, set to become Bangladesh’s next prime minister, greeted supporters on Friday, saying he was “grateful for the love” they had shown him. He promised throughout BNP’s campaign to restore democracy in Bangladesh.
Mahdi Amin, BNP’s election steering committee spokesperson, said Rahman pledged that, as prime minister, he would safeguard the rights and freedoms of citizens.
Thursday’s vote passed largely peacefully, and, despite alleging “inconsistencies and fabrications” during the vote count, Jamaat accepted the outcome of the election on Saturday.
BNP had recently lost its former chairperson, Khaleda Zia – Tarique Rahman’s mother and a two-time prime minister – who died on December 30.
Khaleda Zia had led the party to power in 1991 and again in 2001. Two decades later, her son has returned the BNP to government.
At the party’s Gulshan office that afternoon, BNP activist Kamal Hossain stood among a jubilant crowd. Visibly emotional, he reflected on what he described as years of repression.
“For so long, I felt the regime of Sheikh Hasina would never go,” he said. Referring to the July 2024 uprising that forced her to flee, he added: “Now people have given us this mandate. We have taken back Bangladesh.”
Hossain said the new government’s immediate priorities should be job creation and curbing inflation.
“Prices have been hurting us, and there are too many unemployed young people. The government must address this immediately,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, remained unusually quiet on Friday.
The calm was largely by design: the BNP chose not to hold victory processions.
The Jamaat head office in the capital’s Moghbazar also appeared subdued on Friday. A few supporters around the head office expressed disappointment.
“There has been engineering in the counting process, and the media has been biased against the Jamaat alliance,” said Abdus Salam, a supporter near the office. He argued that a fair process would have yielded more seats.
Others, like Germany-based Jamaat supporter Muaz Abdullah, said Jamaat’s defeat was a failure of organisation.
“In many constituencies, Jamaat didn’t run a good election campaign. They didn’t even have proper polling agents in several places,” he said.
Though the BNP and Jamaat were allies for years, they faced each other as rivals in this election. The campaign period saw sporadic violence and months of divisive online rhetoric.
Sujan Mia, a BNP activist outside the party office, struck a conciliatory tone. “We do not want enmity. We should focus on building the nation,” he said.
Rezaul Karim Rony, editor of Joban Magazine and a political analyst who closely followed the BNP’s campaign, said the party’s victory is likely to allay concerns of a lurch to the right in Bangladesh.
“Through this election, people have, in a sense, freed the country’s politics from that risk,” he argued.
However, Rony cautioned that the real test begins now.
“The challenge is to ensure good governance, law and order, and public safety – and to establish a rights-based state,” he said, describing those goals as being at the “heart of the aspirations of the 2024 mass uprising.”
Michael Kugelman, senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, said a BNP victory represents “a blow to the politics of change that have galvanised Bangladesh since the 2024 mass uprising”.
“The BNP, dynastic and long saddled with corruption allegations, reflects the principles that the Gen Z protesters rejected,” he said.
The party will now face pressure from both the public and the opposition to push beyond old political habits, Kugelman added.
“If the new government falls back on repressive or retributive politics, reform advocates will be disappointed and democratisation efforts will be set back,” he said.
The outcome might be the least disruptive for the region as a whole.
Pakistan might have preferred a Jamaat win, given the party’s historical affinity for Islamabad. But Pakistan has also had strong relations with the BNP, Kugelman pointed out, as has China.
And “India much prefers the BNP to Jamaat,” he added, noting that the BNP is no longer in alliance with Jamaat, which New Delhi believes takes positions contrary to its interests.
Back at the BNP’s office in Dhaka, however, geopolitics felt distant.
Shamsud Doha, a party leader, had brought his two grandchildren to share the moment.
“Nothing matches this feeling,” he said. “We have long suffered under autocratic rule. Now it is our time to build the nation.”
