A man deposits his voting slip into a ballot box at Dhaka Government Muslim High School in Dhaka on Thursday as Bangladesh holds its first election since the government of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was ousted in a national uprising in 2024. Photo by Monirul Alam/EPA
More than 120 million voters in Bangladesh were headed to the polls on Thursday in the first elections since former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League government were driven out by mass public protests that swept the country in 2024.
Amid unprecedented security that has seen authorities deploy nearly a million police and troops at polling stations and on the streets, the contest pits the center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party against an 11-party coalition led by Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest Muslim party, for control of the 350-seat parliament, or Sangsad.
The caretaker administration in Dhaka has promised the election will be free and fair but the Awami League, which remains popular in parts of Bangladesh, is banned from running.
Voters are also voting in a referendum to approve a package of sweeping constitutional reforms setting out how the country will be governed, drawn up by the interim government that has run Bangladesh since protesters stormed Hasina’s residence in August 2024, forcing her to flee to India.
The charter would rein in executive branch power and boost the system of checks and balances in a bid to avoid any repeat of the abuses of recent decades that enabled Hasina to cling to power for more than 15 years.
BNP leader Tarique Rahman, who will become prime minister if his party tops the polls as expected, speaking on Thursday before polling stations opened, pledged a new type of politics, including a “top down, no tolerance” approach to sleaze.
“We saw in the last regime that corruption was encouraged. Our economy was left destroyed. It will take time, but if we establish real accountability in every part of the government and send a message down the chain, that will eventually control corruption,” Rahman told The Guardian.
Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, published Wednesday, ranked Bangladesh 150th of out of 182 countries it evaluated, a negligible gain of one place from 2024.
Rahman, 60, is from one of the country’s two main political dynasties. His father, Ziaur Rahman, was one of the leading figures in the country’s battle for independence from India and served as president from 1977 until he was assassinated in 1981. His mother, Khaleda Zia, was Bangladesh’s first woman prime minister, serving two terms from 1991 to 1996 and 2001 to 2006.
Tarique Rahman only returned to the country in December after living in exile in London since 2008 after the High Court threw out his conviction for alleged involvement in a 2004 grenade attack on an Awami League rally in Dhaka that killed 24 people and injured 300 others.
He spent 18 months in prison after being arrested in March 2007, following a military coup, prior to being allowed to travel to London in September 2008 for medical treatment and was sentenced to life in prison in 2018 after a trial-in-absentia for his alleged role in the grenade attack. He faced dozens of other prosecutions and subsequent convictions, many of which were overturned on appeal.
In November, a court in Dhaka sentenced Hasina to death for crimes against humanity for presiding over a violent crackdown on student protests in which her security forces killed as many as 1,400 people in the run-up to her ouster.
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Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., looks on as Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., speaks during a press conference after weekly Senate Republican caucus luncheon at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
