For 15 years, the former prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s Awami League (AL) orchestrated sham elections, jailed and killed its opponents, and stacked state institutions with sycophants. Then came the student-led “monsoon revolution”, which in August 2024 toppled the regime at the cost of 1,400 lives. For the past 18 months, an interim government has answered to Muhammad Yunus, an octogenarian Nobel-peace-prize laureate.
But for all the talk of new beginnings, voters put their faith in a party of the old guard. Old habits may die hard from the BNP’s last stint in office, in the early 2000s. For five years in a row, Bangladesh then had the dubious honour of being ranked the world’s most corrupt country by Transparency International, a non-profit organisation. Mr Rahman, scion of a political dynasty, was no stranger to allegations of corruption, which he denies.
Mr Rahman must now prove that he heads a more honest party. He has had a 17-year self-exile in London’s suburbs to think about it. Ahead of the vote, the BNP’s headquarters was teeming with returnees from Britain, and the prodigal son waxed eloquent on anti-corruption matters. But the true test now begins.
The first part is democratic renewal. For that to work, everyone must somehow be brought along—from the disheartened Gen-Z protesters who only won six seats to the Islamists who have made their debut as the main opposition. And what of AL supporters? A middling turnout rate of about 60% suggests that many took the interim government’s ban on their party as an invitation to stay at home. The BNP insists, unpersuasively, that courts alone can decide when and under what conditions the AL might return.
The referendum set out much-needed democratic guardrails, from prime-ministerial term limits to the creation of a new upper house, with powers to check the lower one. But the BNP is all too aware that as the party in power, these checks and balances would now constrain itself. Little wonder that it quietly dispatched operatives to campaign for a “no” and that it is already finding excuses to cherry-pick.
The second challenge is economic. Bangladesh is set to leave the group of “least developed countries” in November. This means losing many trade and loan privileges just as the government is busy chasing down the fortunes smuggled out of the country by cronies—to the tune of $16bn annually, according to the interim government. The new finance minister, Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury, says his to-do list includes trimming red tape, upping the country’s abysmal 7% tax-to-GDP ratio, working on the cost and ease of doing business and charming fund managers from Hong Kong to New York.
Finally, Bangladesh wants a reset with India, its mighty neighbour. Its diplomats have a new go-to word: “dignity” must return to the relationship. “Until August 2024, Bangladesh was almost like a client of India,” complains one retired ambassador. Sheikh Hasina, sentenced to death in absentia, is still sheltering as India’s guest in a Delhi bungalow.
The BNP strikes a more pragmatic tone than the sometimes prickly interim government. But on water-sharing, border security and shady business deals brokered under Sheikh Hasina, it wants to renegotiate terms. In his first press conference after the vote Mr Rahman felt inspired by another American import: “Bangladesh first!” he declared, to great applause.
