The third of this month’s big Asian elections (see my report on the first two here) left no room for doubt. Bangladesh’s voters delivered a landslide victory to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP); its leader, Tarique Rahman, will be the new prime minister, replacing the interim government that has held office since the revolution of 2024.
The BNP won 50.0% of the vote, which in a system of single-member districts means a big win – it collected 211 of the 300 directly-elected seats. With the other historic major party, the Awami League, having been banned, its only serious rival was the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, which managed 68 seats from 31.8% of the vote.
Most of the remaining seats were won by parties aligned with either the BNP or Jamaat, so their individual totals shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but for what it’s worth the best was the youth-led National Citizen Party (in alliance with Jamaat), which had 3.1% and six seats. A further fifty seats are reserved for women and will be filled on a proportional basis, which will bring the BNP up to around 246 of the total 350.
Rahman has a big task ahead of him, including the need to somehow repair relations with big brother India. Historically India is more favorable to the Awami League, and its leader, Sheikh Hasina, is in exile there, having been sentenced to death in absentia after the revolution. But from India’s point of view the Islamists would be even worse (being much more prone to alliance with Pakistan), so there is some incentive to make peace with the BNP.
This is easily Jamaat’s best ever result; in the previous reasonably free election, in 2008, it won 4.6% of the vote. Then it was in alliance with the BNP, which has traditionally been more sympathetic to the Islamists, in contrast to the Awami League’s more secular nationalism. (This post from 2013 gives some of the background.) It seems unlikely that a third of Bangladeshis have suddenly been converted to Jamaat’s theocratic program: more likely they were simply voting for some balance so as not to give the BNP unlimited power.
Bangladesh was never a model democracy, but for a time the two-party system worked reasonably well, with the Awami League and the BNP alternating in power. That stability was overthrown by Hasina’s authoritarianism and it will not be easy to get it back – even if Rahman accepts that it’s necessary to try. But rehabilitation of the Awami League in some fashion seems like an essential step.
The World is Not Enough 