Election preview: Bangladesh

Bangladesh goes to the polls on Sunday to elect a new parliament. As the first national election for the year it’s not a particularly good omen, since the result is very much a foregone conclusion.

Bangladesh started out as East Pakistan; the two halves of the country separated in 1971 following a short but bloody war in which India supported the Bangladeshis. Since then, both it and Pakistan have alternated between periods of dictatorship, usually with a military complexion, and periods of at least approximately democratic rule. Recently, though, the trend in both has been downhill.

In 2008 an apparently fair election brought the Awami League (secular, broadly centre-left) to power, defeating its historic rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP; centre-right with a more religious tinge). Awami leader Sheikh Hasina became prime minister, and she is still there 15 years later.

The BNP boycotted the 2014 election, citing multiple unfairnesses including the arrest of its leader, Khaleda Zia; the Awami League won a landslide as a result. And it did just as well in 2018, even though the BNP had returned to participation: the latter was credited with only 13.1% of the vote and seven of the 350 seats, against more than 300 for the government and its allies.

So now the BNP, with Zia on parole and her son and deputy, Tarique Rahman, in exile, is again refusing to take part in what it regards as a charade. Instead the main opposition comes from the more compliant Jatiya Party (also centre-right), the party of former dictator Hussain Ershad, who died in 2019, now led by his widow. But there is no doubt that the fix is in for the government, and Hasina will win a fourth consecutive term of office.

It would be wrong to suggest that Hasina’s government lacks genuine public support, or that the Awami League is the only one to engage in undemocratic practices; the BNP and its allies have an equally murky record. But after some years of economic growth things seem to have been turning sour. Sourabh Sen at Al-Jazeera records the Awami League’s shift “from a mass-based party of middle-class, secular, pro-Indian leaders, wedded to the spirit of the 1971 liberation struggle, to a party run by China-backed oligarchs – some with dubious credentials.”