'Repay debt to martyrs': Bangladesh embraces change but fears return to past excesses
Bangladesh’s 13th national parliamentary election has delivered a decisive victory for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), marking what many observers describe as the country’s first broadly acceptable and competitive national vote in nearly 18 years.
Held on 12 February 2026, the poll followed the 2024 student-led uprising that forced Sheikh Hasina from office and ushered in an interim administration under Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.
According to the Bangladesh Election Commission, BNP and its allies won 212 of the 300 seats in the Jatiya Sangsad (national parliament), securing a two-thirds majority, far surpassing the 151 required to form government.
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and its allies secured 77 seats, including six won by the National Citizen Party (NCP), a formation led by figures from the student uprising.
BNP chairman Tarique Rahman is now poised to become prime minister after more than 17 years in exile, completing one of the most dramatic political comebacks in recent Bangladeshi history.
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Arrested in 2007, later exiled to the United Kingdom, and long shadowed by corruption allegations he denies, Rahman returned to Bangladesh in December 2025 to contest his first parliamentary election.
In his first address to the nation after the victory, he said: “This victory belongs to Bangladesh. It belongs to democracy. It belongs to the people who have aspired to and sacrificed for democracy.”
Former leader Hasina’s Awami League (AL) was officially barred from contesting the election following the uprising that ousted her after security forces killed at least 1,400 protesters.
The upheaval triggered a transitional legal process targeting senior figures in her government. In May 2025, the interim administration suspended the party’s registration pending investigations into allegations of electoral manipulation, abuse of state power and human rights violations during its final years in office, effectively preventing the AL from fielding candidates.
Exiled in India, Hasina dismissed the election as a “deception and a farce”, arguing that a vote conducted without her party’s participation could not be considered fully democratic.
Reclaiming the right to choose
After more than a decade in which elections were widely criticised as coercive or predetermined, stepping into a polling booth carried emotional weight for many Bangladeshis. The 2024 uprising had broken open a political order, but it had also ushered in a fragile transitional period in which law and order felt unsettled and the future unclear.
'A large parliamentary majority creates an opportunity for reform, but also the temptation to centralise power and sideline dissent'
- Anu Muhammad, political economist
Across districts, voters described a mix of relief and cautious hope. “For years we stood in line and felt nothing would change,” Mohammad Salam, a 38-year-old shopkeeper in Bogura told Middle East Eye. “Today, at least, I felt my vote would be counted.”
In Dhaka, Mehruba Akhter, a first-time voter, linked the ballot directly to the people’s uprising. “We were on the streets demanding change,” she said. “Now we are trying to shape that change.”
Writer and researcher Altaf Parvez told MEE that lower- and middle-income citizens participated in large numbers in both the July uprising and elections. “Their participation carried a single message: a desire for change,” he said. “Eighteen months ago, they demanded change with blood. This time, they repeated that demand through ballots.”
Parvez described the election as a direct outcome of the uprising and argued that the new parliament must “repay the debt to the martyrs” by undertaking substantive steps, from police reform and economic restructuring to rehabilitating public administration.
Political economist Anu Muhammad echoed that sense of historic responsibility but cautioned against complacency.
“A large parliamentary majority creates an opportunity for reform, but also the temptation to centralise power and sideline dissent,” he told MEE, recalling similar landslide victories in 2001 and 2008 that later eroded democratic norms.
A rightward shift
If the election restored competitive politics, it also revealed how far the centre of gravity has shifted.
Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s chapter of the most prevalent Islamist political party in the Indian subcontinent, emerged from the vote as the second-largest bloc in parliament. Its 77 seats, secured with its allies, were its strongest parliamentary showing in the country’s history.
Once marginalised and, at times, formally restricted from political participation, JI re-entered the electoral arena after the 2024 rupture with organisational discipline, financial resources and a sharpened ideological message.
Researchers note that the transition period created space for religious and right-wing actors to assert themselves more visibly.
Parvez says that JI reorganised itself “with remarkable efficiency,” transforming from what had been a fourth-tier electoral force into a credible competitor to major parties in multiple constituencies.
Its campaign leaned heavily on themes of moral order, anti-corruption and administrative discipline, messaging that resonated in a period marked by economic stress and institutional distrust.
However, JI's rise has intensified scrutiny of its position on women and public life. JI’s leader has stated unequivocally in past speeches that women should not occupy the highest executive offices of the state.
In a controversial post on X, he also likened women working outside the home to “prostitution”, a remark that drew a sharp backlash before he later claimed his account had been hacked.
“[Jamaat] will not be able to confine women to their homes again, and must offer a public apology with folded hands,” leftist student activist Sayera Chandra Chakma told MEE.
For many women, particularly younger and urban voters who mobilised during the 2024 uprising, JI's expanded parliamentary presence signals a renewed contest over whether women’s equality in Bangladesh is negotiable.
Samina Lutfa, professor of sociology at the University of Dhaka, argued that tactical alliances between segments of the student-led National Citizen Party (NCP) and JI may have alienated parts of the urban, younger women’s constituency that had mobilised during the 2024 uprising with hopes of a broader, more inclusive civic space.
She described the shift as a return to “old-style power politics”, warning that the pursuit of parliamentary advantage risked diluting the moral force of July.
In her view, sections of the post-uprising leadership failed to take a principled stand against episodes of mob mobilisation during periods of instability, only later repositioning themselves as inheritors of the movement’s legacy. “Claiming the uprising’s symbolism without shouldering its responsibility,” she suggested, “has weakened public trust.”
For now, the election has institutionalised a rightward current that had been gathering momentum since the uprising. Competitive democracy has returned, but so has sharper ideological contestation, particularly over the meaning of pluralism, secularism and gender equality in Bangladesh’s political future.
Women’s representation: participation without power
While women voted in large numbers, their representation in parliament remains starkly low. Of 300 directly elected seats, only seven women won - just over 2 percent.
'We did not beg. We asked for what is rightfully ours'
- Seuty Sabur, Brac University
The imbalance began at nomination, long before ballots were cast. According to election data, 30 of the 51 political parties, including JI, did not nominate a single woman candidate.
The July Charter, which emerged from a very male-dominated post-uprising consensus process, sets only a 5 percent threshold for women’s representation in candidate nominations, a target that activists argue falls far short of both the 30 percent requirement under existing electoral law and long-standing demands for one-third representation in parliament.
“Women have been underrepresented, and political parties have miserably failed to ensure women’s representation,” Seuty Sabur, associate professor of anthropology at Brac University, told MEE. “Many of us were angry and exhausted from reminding parties of their duties. Women were left alone to fend for themselves in claiming equal citizen rights.”
She noted that women’s groups had demanded 33 percent representation, proportional inclusion in consecutive terms and direct elections for reserved seats. “We did not beg,” she said. “We asked for what is rightfully ours.”
For Sabur, the election brings mixed emotions. “The only sigh of relief is that the election happened and anti-liberation forces [those who resisted the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971] are not the majority. For now, we can breathe a little while continuing to build inclusive spaces.”
Mandate and path to reform
Alongside the parliamentary election, voters were asked whether they supported a package of constitutional reforms proposed in the aftermath of the July 2024 uprising.
According to the election commission, 48 million voters chose “yes” and 22.5 million voted “no”, out of nearly 77 million ballots cast, a turnout of just over 60 percent.
Although the proposal passed comfortably nationwide, the “no” vote prevailed in 11 constituencies.
Before polling day, some civil society groups had criticised the design of the referendum itself. Lawyers, academics and rights advocates noted that 84 reform proposals were bundled into a single yes or no question, limiting granular debate and informed choice.
In some constituencies, voters said they remained uncertain about the full scope of what a “yes” or “no” vote would mean in practice.
Even so, the scale of the “yes” vote provides the incoming parliament with a reform mandate that is politically difficult to dismiss. Unlike referendums held under military rule in 1977 and 1985, which produced near-unanimous approval, or the low-turnout constitutional vote of 1991, this referendum took place alongside a competitive national election and yielded a more differentiated outcome.
“Although the outcome does not settle every constitutional debate, it signals public endorsement of structural change,” said Parvez.
The next phase will determine how that mandate is interpreted. Constitutional reform is expected to move through parliamentary committees, potentially including a dedicated constitutional reform council as envisaged in post-uprising discussions.
Key areas under consideration include rebalancing executive power, strengthening parliamentary oversight, reforming policing and public administration and revisiting provisions related to decentralisation and judicial independence.
How inclusive that process becomes, particularly whether minority representatives, indigenous leaders, women’s groups and opposition parties are substantively involved, will shape its legitimacy.
A supermajority gives BNP the numerical capacity to amend the constitution, but the durability of reform will depend on the consultation process. If pursued unilaterally, it risks reopening the cycle of constitutional centralisation that has defined much of Bangladesh’s recent political history.
For now, Bangladesh has completed a largely peaceful and broadly accepted electoral contest. But the deeper verdict lies ahead. With a decisive majority in hand, BNP faces a familiar test: whether it will use its mandate to institutionalise accountability and pluralism, or repeat cycles of centralisation and backlash.
The electorate has signalled its desire for change, first through protest, now through ballots. As one elderly voter put it quietly outside a polling centre: “We have done our part. Now they must do theirs.”
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