In Bangladesh, toppling the regime may have only been half the battle. On Thursday, the country will have its first competitive election since 2009. Voters will determine whether the uprising that ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, kicking off a wave of Gen Z-led protests in Asia, can transform Bangladeshi politics, or whether change in the South Asian country of 175 million people will stop at the removal of one leader.
Rewind to August 2024. Students and young workers flooded the streets of the capital, Dhaka, fed up with Hasina’s 15 years of corruption, economic mismanagement, and increasingly authoritarian rule. The state crackdown on protests left over 1,000 dead and tens of thousands injured. But students stormed the prime minister's house, and Hasina fled to exile in India. The people won. An interim government was then instated with the promise of stability and, later, democracy.
For tens of millions of young people, Thursday will provide the first opportunity to vote in a free and fair election. But dreams of a democratic reset in Bangladesh have faded. The economy has nosedived, student-activist-formed political parties have fractured, and political violence has surged. Eurasia Group’s South Asia expert Pramit Chaudhuri says that many of the constitutional changes the students demanded are unlikely to come to fruition. “A key demand entailed prime ministers losing a fair amount of their executive power. That isn’t something I think either party would be prepared to do,” he says.
Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize winner for pioneering microfinance, was brought in to lead the interim government but has struggled to keep the economy on track. The garment sector, which accounts for more than 80% of Bangladesh's exports, has been hit by tariffs, labor unrest, and closing mills. High youth unemployment has persisted, inflation has increased, and industrial growth has slowed. “The economy has been badly disrupted by the fall of the Hasina government and the overall incompetence of the Yunus government,” says Chaudhuri.
Who’s on the ballot: For years, political power in Bangladesh has been split between Hasina’s Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). Now, the Awami League has been barred from running, and the BNP is facing the Jamaat-e-Islami – the country’s largest Islamist party – and its 11-party coalition. “What we’re seeing is a new bipolarity,” says Chaudhuri, who says even if Jamaat doesn’t win, the party is here to stay.
But the candidates themselves are far from the fresh faces envisioned by the protesters who toppled Bangladesh’s autocracy. The frontrunner is the BNP, the longtime rival of Hasina and her party, now led by Tarique Rahman, the son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. After spending 17 years in exile, Rahman is positioning himself and the BNP as the party of business and stability. Their position has attracted Awami voters, nearly half of whom support the BNP now that their own party is banned.
One of the most oppressed political movements of Hasina’s rule is also in the mix on Thursday. Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim-majority country’s largest Islamist party, could claim a historic share of the vote. But the party has traditional views on the role of women, including that they shouldn’t serve in leadership roles. This has historically isolated them in a country that has had two female prime ministers and a secular government. However, since the student revolution, they have rebranded as the “Islamist left,” the party of change, and have managed to win over a number of student activists. One of the few remaining prominent student parties, the National Citizen Party, allied itself with Jamaat ahead of the election, widening the party’s appeal among younger and less conservative voters.
What’s at stake? Chaudhuri warns that the risk of violence around the election is high, especially in close races or hung parliaments. “Bangladeshi politics tends to be pretty violent,” he says.
Thursday’s vote will determine whether Bangladesh moves forward toward the government Gen-Z fought for, or the status quo is reestablished. In a country where 28% of voters are in Gen Z, the reforms they risked their lives for largely do not seem to be represented by the parties on the ballot.
While much has changed in the structure of Bangladesh's politics, from the rise of an Islamist party to the fall of the Awami League. On Thursday, Chaudhuri says the ballot will reveal whether “the student revolution really has any lasting impact on the nature of Bangladeshi politics.”
