The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) won a two-thirds majority of parliamentary seats in Thursday’s election, allowing it to form the next government and install its leader Tarique Rahman as prime minister.
The election was the first since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was driven from power by violent demonstrations in August 2024, ending 15 years of rule. Hasina’s Awami League party has since been outlawed and was unable to field candidates in Thursday’s election, leaving many of its voters to choose the BNP.
BNP defeated an alliance of 11 rival parties led by an Islamist party called Jamaat-e-Islami, which grew in strength during the student protests of 2024, but proved unable to translate its support into electoral strength. One of the parties in the Jamaat alliance, the National Citizen Party (NCP), has accused officials of tampering with the vote totals and demanded an audit before the results are finalized.
The Associated Press (AP) noted that most Bangladeshis found BNP’s reformist message and promises of stability more comforting after a turbulent year, even though the party was not terribly popular before the fall of Hasina:
The path from the 2024 uprising to Thursday’s election has been marked by turmoil. Bangladesh grappled with unrest after a student leader’s death, a resurgence of Islamist groups, the fraying of the rule of law, attacks on Hindu minorities and the press, as well as a struggling economy.
“Rahman has said all the right things, pledging to eliminate corruption and bring the country together. That all sounds well and good. But the BNP has a poor track record from when it was last in power — there was repression and corruption,” said Michael Kugelman, a Senior Fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council.
Rahman returned from 17 years of exile in London to lead his party, defying a 2018 sentence of life in prison for his alleged role in a 2004 attempt to assassinate Hasina with a grenade that killed 24 other people. His conviction was formally set aside after Hasina went into exile in India last year.
Rahman is not exactly a populist dynamo. His mother was former prime minister Khaleda Zia, who died shortly after Rahman returned to Bangladesh in December. His father was Ziaur Rahman, a former president and revolutionary leader in Bangladesh’s bid for independence from Pakistan in the 1970s, who was assassinated in 1981.
Rahman and the BNP have both been accused of corruption over the years, and his status as the son of a “freedom fighter” will annoy the student protesters who kicked Hasina out of office, because the primary reason for their anger was a quota system designed to perpetually favor revolutionary leaders and their offspring. Rahman was also politically influential under his mother’s reign, without actually holding an office or facing accountability, which is the sort of arrangement the “Gen Z” protesters despise.
Rahman did his best to play to disaffected Bangladeshis, reinventing himself as a reformist with a tight focus on creating jobs, supporting the rule of law, caring for the poor, and fighting corruption. The student revolutionaries didn’t really want to fall back to the first of the two dynasties that have controlled Bangladesh throughout its entire existence as an independent nation, but with the Islamists unable to gain traction, Rahman did a solid job of convincing voters that BNP was the only serious alternative.
Jamaat-e-Islami will have to settle for going from a total ban under Hasina to becoming the main opposition party, taking 68 seats out of 350, versus 209 for the BNP. The leader of Jamaat, Shafiqur Rahman, won the seat he was competing for.
The NCP, a party formed by leaders of the student protest movement only a few months before the election was held, performed a bit behind expectations but managed to win one seat for its founder, Nahid Islam.
In a nod to its defeated opponents, the BNP announced that it would hold prayer sessions at mosques on Friday in lieu of victory rallies.
Both India and Pakistan, which have been competing for the affections of Bangladesh since the pro-India Hasina was driven from power, rushed to congratulate Rahman and the BNP.
“This victory shows the trust of the people of Bangladesh in your leadership,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Rahman on Friday.
“India will continue to stand in support of a democratic, progressive and inclusive Bangladesh. I look forward to working with you to strengthen our multifaceted relations and advance our common development goals,” Modi said.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari congratulated Rahman on “BNP’s landslide victory,” and also congratulated the people of Bangladesh “on their successful, peaceful polls.”
“Pakistan reaffirms strong support for democratic partnership and shared progress ahead,” he said.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif extended his “warmest felicitations” to Rahman and congratulated him for a “resounding victory.”
“I look forward to working closely with the new Bangladesh leadership to further strengthen our historic, brotherly multifaceted bilateral relations and advance our shared goals of peace, stability, and development in South Asia and beyond,” Sharif said.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also offered his congratulations and said the United States “looks forward to working with the newly elected government to advance prosperity and the security of the region.”
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