Bangladesh at the Crossroads: Elections and the Future of the World’s Eighth Largest Country

BNP leader Tarique Rahman -- Image cropped via X

By Vijay Prashad and Atul Chandra

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) won a sweeping victory in the 12 February 2026 elections, securing 212 of 300 parliamentary seats. This victory represents not merely a change of government. It is the culmination of a political process that began not with the spontaneous anger of students on the streets of Dhaka in 2024, but much earlier, in the strategic calculations of sections of the Bangladeshi oligarchy and their patrons in the Global North. The Awami League, which had been overthrown in 2024, was banned from the elections. The two major blocs came from the right. Only seven women will sit in the parliament of 350. Only one explicitly left candidate (Zonayed Saki) won.

To understand what has happened in Bangladesh, we must situate this transition within the broader production of a new political geography in Southern and Eastern Asia. The United States, which has sought to reassert control over the Western Hemisphere, is trying with all its instruments to prevent the growth of sovereignty across Africa and Asia as well. Bangladesh’s transition is part of that process.

US policy is not built on a house of sand. The uprising that overthrew the government of Sheikh Hasina in 2024 was real. According to the Labour Force Survey (LFS) conducted by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) in 2024, there is a significant number of unemployed youths with degrees in Bangladesh. Youth unemployment among graduates at 13.5 percent, informal employment accounting for over 84 percent of the labour force, the suffocating weight of the Digital Security Act and systematic political repression: these are structural contradictions produced by Bangladesh’s export-dependent growth model. But the existence of grievances and the political operationalisation of those grievances are two entirely different matters. The history of foreign political interference, from Georgia and Ukraine to Egypt, teaches a consistent lesson: US hyper-imperialism does not manufacture discontent from nothing; it identifies existing fault lines, funds and channels opposition movements, and orchestrates the escalation from reform demands to regime change at moments of strategic opportunity.

Bangladesh in 2024 followed this textbook with striking fidelity. The quota protests escalated into a wholesale rejection of the Hasina government with a speed and coordination that spontaneous democratic upsurge alone cannot explain. As previously argued, the pattern mirrors Egypt 2011: real suffering, but a political trajectory shaped by forces far removed from the streets. The military-intelligence establishment’s decision to facilitate, rather than suppress, Hasina’s departure is the classic state mechanism through which externally-driven interventions are consummated. When the security apparatus chooses not to defend the sitting government, it is because a decision has already been made, often in coordination with external powers, that the existing regime has outlived its usefulness. The Awami League’s primary offence, from Washington’s perspective, was not its authoritarianism but its strategic autonomy: its balancing act between Beijing and Washington, its acceptance of Chinese infrastructure investment, and its resistance to full integration into the US-led Indo-Pacific architecture. Authoritarianism in US allies, from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines under Marcos, occasions no such transformation. It is sovereignty, not repression, that triggers the interventionist playbook.

Muhammad Yunus and the Neoliberal Fait Accompli

The interim government fronted by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus was not a passive caretaker. Much like Mohamed ElBaradei in Egypt, also a Nobel Prize winner, Yunus was the internationally palatable face of a transition whose content was determined by far less visible forces. But unlike ElBaradei, Yunus had deep relationships with Global North financial institutions, alongside his global microfinance network, to implement a comprehensive economic programme before a single vote was cast.

The centrepiece was a $6.4 billion IMF package carrying the standard conditionalities: elimination of fuel subsidies, monetary tightening, banking sector “restructuring,” and fiscal consolidation. Bangladesh’s external debt, already exceeding $100 billion, was further leveraged to enforce compliance with a programme benefiting international creditors and domestic financial elites. Despite his ‘banker to the poor’ reputation, Yunus oversaw stagnating real wages in the garment sector while inflation approached 9 percent. For approximately four million garment workers, overwhelmingly women, the democratic transition was measured in lost purchasing power.

This is how such transformations deliver their real payload: not through regime change itself, but through restructuring the economic terrain during the “transition,” ensuring that whoever wins the subsequent election inherits a fait accompli. By 12 February, the parameters of economic policy had been locked in. Democracy was reduced to choosing which faction would administer austerity.

BNP, Washington’s Strategic Reward, and the Fracturing of Bangladesh’s Political Landscape

The BNP’s super-majority is less a democratic verdict than the intended outcome of a two-year political engineering process. For Washington, Bangladesh is a critical node in the containment geography being constructed around China, linking the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asian maritime chokepoints. Under Hasina, Bangladesh accepted Chinese infrastructure investment in projects like the Payra deep-sea port while resisting pressure on military basing and alignment within the Quad-adjacent framework. The BNP, rooted in the military-bureaucratic establishment rather than the Awami League’s secular-nationalist tradition, has historically been amenable to US preferences on market liberalization and security cooperation. Its return signals the strategic recalibration the entire process was designed to produce: deeper integration into US-led frameworks, cooling relations with Beijing, and a permissive posture toward the Western financial conditionalities Yunus had already locked in.

For South Asia, the implications are severe. A Bangladesh oriented toward Washington weakens autonomous regional cooperation, undermines the space for non-aligned development that BRICS and other multilateral platforms have sought to construct, and introduces new instability into an already fractured subcontinent.

Yet the domestic landscape this engineered transition has produced is more volatile than its architects likely intended. Contrary to the 2001-2006 era, BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami contested the elections as bitter rivals. Jamaat led its own 11-Party Alliance, winning 77 seats, with the campaign marked by open hostility and direct BNP-Jamaat clashes in constituencies like Dhaka-3. The rupture carries a historically unprecedented consequence: Jamaat-e-Islami now occupies the position of principal opposition, a status it has never held in Bangladeshi history. An alliance with the National Citizens Party, the group led by the students of 2024, gives the Jamaat extraordinary legitimacy.

The Jamaat is a party whose leadership was implicated in collaboration with the Pakistani military during the 1971 Liberation War and whose senior figures were convicted of war crimes. Freed from coalition constraints, Jamaat can now build hegemonic influence in universities, professional associations, and civil society from the opposition benches, setting ideological terms without bearing governmental responsibility. This is an advantageous position for long-term societal transformation.

The most tragic dimension is what happened to the forces instrumentalised to make the 2024 transformation possible. The National Citizen Party, the political wing of the Gen Z protest movement, failed to translate street power into electoral results. Many student leaders, including figures like Nahid Islam, aligned with Jamaat’s 11-Party Alliance rather than the BNP, viewing the latter as just another dynastic party. The result: youth revolutionaries who toppled a regime ended up in a camp with hardline Islamists, united only by opposition to BNP’s “return to business as usual.” The structural logic mirrors Egypt precisely: without an organised left with a coherent class programme, popular energy is captured by whichever force can most effectively present itself as anti-establishment. Meanwhile, targeted arrests of Awami League members and allied left forces, including the Workers Party of Bangladesh, have continued; media outlets have been shut down and opponents charged with serious offences. The custodians of repression change; repression itself is a structural feature of the state.

Bangladesh now faces a compounded crisis: a BNP government administering IMF-mandated austerity with unchecked parliamentary power; a Jamaat building hegemonic influence with unprecedented institutional recognition; a betrayed generation dispersed across incompatible political vehicles; and an economy pre-configured by neoliberal consolidation with no fiscal space for redistribution. The Indo-Pacific is being reorganised by the political engineering of state orientations. Bangladesh is the latest territory in this new geography. The task for the forces of labour and anti-imperialist solidarity is not merely to document what has been done, but to organise the response.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

Atul Chandra is the Asia Co-Coordinators of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.