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15-02-2026
DHAKA: As rickshaw puller Anwar Pagla turned into the road leading to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) office in Gulshan, Dhaka, on the afternoon after the parliamentary election, a small commotion stirred. His rickshaw had a Bangladeshi flag fixed to one side of the hood and the BNP’s flag to the other. Pagla is an ardent supporter.
“They call me mad because I consider this party everything in my life but it doesn’t matter. We have won and Bangladesh will now be better,” he told media.
Nearly two decades after it last governed, the BNP returned to power after a landslide victory in Thursday’s parliamentary election.
The Election Commission published the gazette of the members of parliament elected, a final official seal on the election process, on Saturday. The centre-right BNP’s alliance secured 212 of the 300 seats. The alliance led by its main rival, the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest religion-based party, secured 77.
Those elections came a year and a half after a nationwide protest movement ousted the country’s former leadership and saw 1,400 people killed in the streets. Bangladesh has been led by a caretaker government since Sheikh Hasina, who led the crackdown, fled the country.
The BNP’s Tarique Rahman, set to become Bangladesh’s next prime minister, greeted supporters on Friday, saying he was “grateful for the love” they had shown him. He promised throughout BNP’s campaign to restore democracy in Bangladesh.
Mahdi Amin, BNP’s election steering committee spokesperson, said Rahman pledged that, as prime minister, he would safeguard the rights and freedoms of citizens.
Thursday’s vote passed largely peacefully, and, despite alleging “inconsistencies and fabrications” during the vote count, Jamaat accepted the outcome of the election on Saturday.
BNP had recently lost its former chairperson, Khaleda Zia, Tarique Rahman’s mother and a two-time prime minister who died on December 30.
Khaleda Zia had led the party to power in 1991 and again in 2001. Two decades later, her son has returned the BNP to government.
At the party’s Gulshan office that afternoon, BNP activist Kamal Hossain stood among a jubilant crowd. Visibly emotional, he reflected on what he described as years of repression.
“For so long, I felt the regime of Sheikh Hasina would never go,” he said. Referring to the July 2024 uprising that forced her to flee, he added: “Now people have given us this mandate. We have taken back Bangladesh.”
Hossain said the new government’s immediate priorities should be job creation and curbing inflation.
“Prices have been hurting us, and there are too many unemployed young people. The government must address this immediately,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, remained unusually quiet on Friday.
The calm was largely by design: the BNP chose not to hold victory processions.
The Jamaat head office in the capital’s Moghbazar also appeared subdued on Friday. A few supporters around the head office expressed disappointment.
“There has been engineering in the counting process, and the media has been biased against the Jamaat alliance,” said Abdus Salam, a supporter near the office. He argued that a fair process would have yielded more seats.
Others, like Germany-based Jamaat supporter Muaz Abdullah, said Jamaat’s defeat was a failure of organization.
“In many constituencies, Jamaat didn’t run a good election campaign. They didn’t even have proper polling agents in several places,” he said. (Int’l News Desk)
