Bangladesh Election: Hasina Wins Another Term

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Facts

• Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been re-elected after her Awami League party and its allies won 223 of 300 parliamentary seats in Sunday's election.¹
• With a boycott from the main opposition party, independent candidates secured a total of 63, while the Jatiya Party, the third largest in the country, got 11 seats.²
• According to the country's Election Commission, the voter turnout was about 40%. In comparison, the last election in the country of about 170M people had a voter turnout of nearly 80%.³
• Hasina, who first became Bangladesh's prime minister in 1996 and has been in power since her re-election in 2009, is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh who was killed in an army coup in 1975. This will be Hasina's fifth term serving as prime minister, and fourth consecutive term.⁴
• The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party had boycotted the polls after Hasina refused its demands to resign and allow a neutral government to oversee the vote.⁵
• In the months leading up to the general election, hundreds of thousands of activists have reportedly been detained. There have also been allegations of the Awami League party fielding fake candidates on the ballot.⁶

Sources: ¹BBC News, ²Al Jazeera, ³The Wire, ⁴The Indian Express, ⁵Reuters and ⁶Verity.

Narratives

• Left narrative, as provided by Al Jazeera. While she will govern Bangladesh again, the facade of a stable Hasina government can't mask the intensifying political strife, economic crisis, human rights abuses, and the stifling of dissent. Hasina's fifth total term will, at best, lead to de-facto one-party rule in Bangladesh rather than end the political deadlock or restore democracy.
• Right narrative, as provided by India Today. In the past 15 years, Sheikh Hasina has turned around Bangladesh's economy, which has tripled the country's per capita income and lifted over 25M people out of poverty. Her fifth term will provide much-needed political stability for Bangladesh, which spun into turmoil following COVID and a global economic slowdown.