Bangladesh’s 12 February election had an atmosphere strikingly different from the fraud-ridden vote of January 2024. Turnout was high, and international and domestic observers pronounced it largely credible. For a country that hadn’t experienced a genuine transfer of power in over 15 years, this was real progress. But the next steps on Bangladesh’s democratic journey are far from assured.

A democratic uprising

The 2024 vote seemingly granted long-time autocratic Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League continuing power. But just months later she was toppled by a mass Generation Z-led uprising.

Protests began after Bangladesh’s High Court reinstated a 30 per cent quota reserving government jobs for descendants of 1971 independence war veterans. With other quotas, this left less than half of public sector jobs open to recruitment on merit. Widely seen as a vehicle for Awami League patronage, the system was a source of deep frustration among young people in a country with acute youth unemployment.

Protests mobilised from June 2024, coordinated by the Students Against Discrimination network, spreading nationwide through road and railway blockades. The government’s response turned a policy dispute into a political crisis. Members of the Awami League’s student wing launched coordinated attacks on protesters. Authorities imposed a nationwide curfew with a shoot-on-sight order and shut down the internet. Security forces fired lethal weapons at crowds. The United Nations estimated that at least 1,400 people were killed in the repression.

The brutality backfired. Protesters used their phones to document every incident, and footage circulated widely after internet access was partly restored, directly undermining the government’s narrative that cast protesters as violent agitators. The killing of student coordinator Abu Sayed, captured on camera as he stood unarmed with arms outstretched before police opened fire, became the uprising’s defining image.

What began as a rejection of a quota system became a unified call for Hasina’s resignation. On 5 August, facing a mass march on her residence, she submitted her resignation and fled to India aboard an army helicopter.

Bangladesh’s Gen Z revolution helped inspire subsequent uprisings in Indonesia, Madagascar, Nepal and beyond.

The road to the election

Three days after Hasina fled, Muhammad Yunus was sworn in as Chief Adviser of an interim government. His appointment was a victory for the student movement, which had made clear protesters wouldn’t accept a military-backed administration. Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist and founder of Grameen Bank, an innovative community development bank and microfinance organisation, was seen as a neutral figure with global credibility. He outlined three priorities: to initiate major institutional reforms, to hold those responsible for political violence accountable and to organise a free and fair election.

The interim government re-established the International Crimes Tribunal, a domestic judicial body first set up in 2009, to try those responsible for serious abuses under Hasina’s regime and formed six reform commissions covering the constitution, election system, judiciary, police, public administration and the fight against corruption. The government compiled their recommendations and established a National Consensus Commission to negotiate a common reform agenda with political parties.

On 5 August 2025, the first anniversary of Hasina’s resignation, Yunus announced the July Declaration, a sweeping political manifesto that gave the uprising formal recognition, designated those killed as national heroes and set out broad principles of democratic renewal. The declaration established the interim government’s official narrative of what had happened and why, an act of political legitimation as much as commemoration. It was also contested: the declaration avoided blaming the long-time opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) or the right-wing Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party for any historical wrongdoing, heaping all responsibility on the Awami League.

The July National Charter set out a more detailed reform agenda, resulting from months-long negotiations with political parties through the National Consensus Commission process. The charter offered a package of 84 proposals, including 48 constitutional amendments, designed to reduce the concentration of power in the prime minister’s office, strengthen the opposition’s parliamentary oversight role and make it structurally harder for any future government to capture the state the way Hasina had. In October, most political parties signed it.

Going into the election, the party landscape was different from anything Bangladesh had seen before. In May 2025, the interim government banned the Awami League and all its activities under the Anti-Terrorism Act, citing its role in the killings. The Election Commission simultaneously suspended the party’s registration. In November, the International Crimes Tribunal convicted Hasina of crimes against humanity in absentia and sentenced her to death.

With the Awami League excluded, the main competitors were the BNP, returning from years of persecution and boycott, and a resurgent Jamaat-e-Islami, the interim government having lifted its 2013 ban. International observers warned that banning the country’s largest party risked disenfranchising millions of its supporters and undermining the election’s legitimacy, however free and competitive it might otherwise be.

The timing of the election was bitterly contested. For months, Yunus avoided giving a clear timetable. He eventually announced the election for June 2026, before rising pressure forced him to move the date to April and finally to February. The BNP, eager to capitalise on its position as frontrunner, pushed hard for an early date, while the newly established National Citizen Party (NCP), founded by Gen Z protesters, wanted more time to organise and for reforms to be secured before any vote was held.

Also contested was the date of a referendum mandated by the July Charter so reforms would carry democratic legitimacy. The BNP wanted the election and referendum held simultaneously, while Jamaat-e-Islami and the NCP demanded the referendum be held first to lock in institutional reforms before a new parliament took office. The BNP got its way.

A dynasty returns

The BNP and its allies won 209 of 299 seats up for voting, securing a decisive two-thirds majority, while Jamaat-e-Islami emerged as the main opposition with close to 80 seats, its best-ever result. The NCP won just six of the 30 seats it contested.

Bangladesh’s parliament has 350 seats: 300 are directly elected, with the remaining 50, reserved for women, distributed among parties in proportion to their share of votes. This time, only 299 seats were contested due to the death of a candidate.

The BNP’s victory was a remarkable reversal of fortune. Its leader, Tarique Rahman, returned to Bangladesh in December after 17 years of self-imposed exile in the UK. His mother, Khaleda Zia, twice prime minister and the defining symbol of BNP opposition to Hasina, died days after his return. Within weeks, Rahman inherited the party chair, stood in the election and was sworn in as prime minister.

Beyond the personal drama, the reality is that Bangladesh is again led by a member of one of two dominant political families, whose rivalry has shaped national politics for decades. The BNP last held power from 2001 to 2006, before being defeated by Hasina. It has now returned to government through an election made possible by the uprising that toppled her.

Many protesters wanted exactly that: Hasina out and free elections restored. But some wanted more, hoping the uprising would mark a rejection of Bangladesh’s entire dynastic political order and bring the voices of a new generation into governance. That hasn’t happened.

In an election triggered by a Gen Z uprising, the youth-led NCP achieved little impact. Its poor showing reflected both structural constraints and strategic errors. Formed in February 2025, it had less than a year to build an organisation from scratch, with limited funds and no established networks beyond urban centres. But then in December, in a decision that proved harmful to its broader appeal, it allied with Jamaat-e-Islami as part of an 11-party coalition, agreeing to compete for only 30 seats in exchange for the Islamist party’s organisational reach. Many young voters who’d hoped for a genuinely new politics interpreted the alliance as a capitulation to the old order, and the decision exposed internal divisions: prominent NCP figures resigned in protest and stood as independents.

NCP leader Nahid Islam, only 27 years old, did win a seat, becoming one of the youngest members of parliament, and the party says it will rebuild in opposition with an eye on local government elections due in a year. But it has little political leverage. The generation that made the revolution may find itself watching from the margins, and could be forced back onto the streets if institutions deny it a voice.

An uncertain path

By Bangladesh’s recent standards, the election was a genuine achievement. Turnout was 60 per cent, up from 42 per cent in the fraud-ridden 2024 poll. In the referendum, over 60 per cent of voters endorsed the July Charter, giving the reform agenda a democratic mandate that will be difficult for the new government to ignore.

But the election would have been more legitimate if all parties had been permitted to participate freely. And it wasn’t entirely free of violence: local media and rights groups documented that at least 16 political activists, mostly from the BNP, were killed between December 2025 and election day.

The coming months will be telling. The incoming government inherits a state apparatus politicised over decades of one-party dominance. Old authoritarian habits die hard. To break with the past, the BNP should fully implement the July Charter in genuine consultation with civil society and opposition parties, protect media freedoms and protest rights, and refrain from the kind of repression that has characterised previous administrations.

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