Gen Z Got Fair Elections in Bangladesh—but Got Crushed at the Ballot Box

So, too, in Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina is gone but the massive winner of the election was not the party started by young leaders of the protests, or any other reform-minded party, but the BNP, the other half of the long-ruling duopoly. The BNP, which won by a landslide, has said all the right things, but many Bangladeshis do not trust it. As the BBC noted, “Although the BNP are promising to lead change in the country, the party was criticized for corruption and accused of human rights violations when it was last in government in the early 2000s.” Coming in second was the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, which attempted an image makeover for the election but has in the past been linked to deadly political violence, and is expressly misogynist. And even though this election was, on Election Day, free and fair, there was a spate of seemingly political killings and other violence leading up to the vote, as has happened too many times before in Bangladesh. The National Citizen Party (NCP), founded by the student leaders of the 2024 protests, won only six of the 30 seats it contested in parliament, a very weak showing.