Bangladesh's politics: an argument about who runs the vote

How the constitution divides power

The constitution enacted on 4 November 1972 set up a unitary parliamentary republic, and in outline that is what the country is again. The Jatiya Sangsad, the House of the Nation, is a single chamber of 350 seats. Three hundred are filled by direct election; the other 50 are reserved for women and allotted to parties in proportion to their vote, with the candidates approved by a vote of Parliament. Members sit for five years. The reserved seats have grown with each settlement: 15 in the election of 1973, 30 from 1979 to 1991, and 45 before the Fifteenth Amendment of 30 June 2011 raised them to 50. The Seventeenth Amendment of 2018 extended the reservation for 25 years from 30 January 2019.

The president is elected by Parliament for five years, with a limit of two terms, and appoints as prime minister the leader of the majority party or coalition. The prime minister and cabinet hold executive power. The Supreme Court has an Appellate Division and a High Court Division; the constitution of 1972 required the judiciary to be fully separate from the executive, and a Supreme Judicial Council set up in 1977 draws up the judges' code of conduct and advises the president on their removal. The courts have repeatedly decided political questions: a High Court bench barred Jamaat-e-Islami from elections in 2013, and it was a ruling of the High Court and then of the Appellate Division that framed the protests of 2024. Britannica's summary is that the design has been in force for less of the country's history than its date suggests, because coups interrupted it: from 1975 to 1990 power sat with the army under a mix of presidential and parliamentary forms, and a referendum in September 1991 restored the parliamentary system with a president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government.

The constitution names Bangla as the state language in Article 3 and Islam as the state religion in Article 2A, while also upholding secularism and equal rights for all religions. The original text of 1972 was secular and Bengali nationalist and denied recognition to the country's ethnic minorities; Manabendra Narayan Larma, a member for the hill tracts, argued in the Constituent Assembly for Bangladeshi in place of Bengali as the definition of nationality.

How the army governed between the coups

For fifteen years the constitution was suspended, amended or worked around by soldiers who then sought civilian legitimacy through the ballot. After the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in August 1975, the country passed through three changes of power in three months, including the killings in Dhaka jail on 3 November and a coup and counter-coup that week. Ziaur Rahman emerged as the army's leader, became chief martial law administrator in November 1976 and president on 21 April 1977, was confirmed by referendum in May 1977, and won a presidential election in June 1978 with 76% of the vote. He lifted the ban on parties imposed under Mujib's one-party rule, founded the BNP on 1 September 1978, and held parliamentary elections in February 1979 in which more than 30 parties stood.

Hussain Muhammad Ershad followed the same path after his bloodless coup of 24 March 1982: martial law, the presidency from 11 December 1983, a party of his own, a parliamentary election in May 1986 that the BNP boycotted and the Awami League contested, and a presidential election in October 1986 in which he took 84% of the vote. In November 1986 his parliament amended the constitution to confirm the acts of the martial law regime, and martial law was lifted. Military representation on local councils, passed in July 1987, brought the Awami League, the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami into the same protest movement for the first time, and weeks of protest ended his rule in December 1990.

Why a caretaker government became the central dispute

The caretaker system was an answer to distrust. When Hussain Muhammad Ershad resigned in December 1990 after weeks of protest, the opposition parties chose the chief justice, Shahabuddin Ahmed, to head a neutral government and hold the election of 1991. A caretaker government is led by a chief adviser with the powers of a prime minister except over defence, and its advisers act as ministers.

The arrangement was meant to be a one-off. In February 1996 the governing BNP held an election that the Awami League and other opposition parties boycotted, and under street pressure the new parliament passed a constitutional amendment making the caretaker system permanent. Caretaker governments then ran the elections of June 1996, 2001 and 2008, and power changed hands at each of the first two.

The system broke in 2006 over who would lead it. At least 40 people died in rioting in November 2006, the scheduled election of January 2007 never took place, and a state of emergency was declared. A caretaker administration under Fakhruddin Ahmed, a former World Bank economist backed by the military, ran the country for almost two years; by July 2007 some 200,000 people had been arrested on corruption charges, and both party leaders were detained. It held elections on 29 December 2008, which the Awami League won with a two-thirds majority.

In 2011 the Awami League government abolished the caretaker system, arguing that a neutral caretaker could abuse its power, as the prime minister said the 2006 to 2008 administration had. The Wikipedia account of the period calls the abolition the largest single cause of dispute between the two main parties from then on.

What happened to elections after the caretaker system ended

The three elections the sitting government then organised were all contested on their conduct.

The turnout of 5 January 2014 is itself disputed. Wikipedia's election summary gives 22%, and Britannica gives an average of slightly more than half nationally and less than a quarter in Dhaka, against a norm above 80% in earlier elections. The Awami League was declared the winner of 127 of the 154 uncontested seats before a vote was cast. In the December 2018 election it took 257 seats, with 80% turnout, while candidates of the opposition were imprisoned, disqualified or assaulted in the campaign.

The Economist Intelligence Unit classified Bangladesh as a hybrid regime in 2022.

How the parties have organised politics

From 1991 to 2024 national politics was a contest between two parties and two leaders. The Awami League, founded in 1949 and the party of the independence movement, was led by Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, formed by Ziaur Rahman after he took power in 1975, was led by his widow Khaleda Zia. The era was dubbed the Battle of the Begums. Traditionally the BNP found allies among Islamist parties such as Jamaat-e-Islami, and the Awami League among leftist and secular parties.

The Jatiya Party, formed by Ershad to legitimise his rule, won 251 of 300 seats in a 1988 election the main parties boycotted and has survived as a smaller party. Jamaat-e-Islami was barred from contesting elections by a court in 2013 on the ground that its charter violated the constitution's secularism. The leaders of the 2024 uprising formed a party of their own, the National Citizen Party, on 28 February 2025.

Boycotts are a working instrument, not an exception. Opposition parties walked out of Parliament for long periods in the 1990s, and general strikes rose from six days in 1997 to 27 in 1999. Almost every party has a student wing, a practice dating from the language and independence movements, and students led both the language protests of 1952 and the protests of 2024.

How the government fell to student protests

The fall of the government was set off by a court ruling. On 5 June 2024 the High Court reinstated a 30% reservation of civil service posts for descendants of freedom fighters of 1971, reversing a government decision taken in 2018 after an earlier round of quota protests. Students protested in June and July, the government responded with its party's student wing, the police and paramilitary forces, and on 21 July the Appellate Division cut the reserved share from 56% of posts to 7%. By then the demand was the government's resignation. On 5 August 2024 the army chief announced that the prime minister had resigned, and she left for India the same day.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, invited by the interim government, published its findings on 12 February 2025. It found reasonable grounds to believe that the former government, its security and intelligence services and violent elements associated with the Awami League had systematically committed serious violations between 1 July and 15 August 2024, including hundreds of extrajudicial killings, serious injuries to thousands of protesters, extensive arbitrary detention and torture, with the knowledge and direction of the political leadership, and it recommended criminal investigation for possible crimes against humanity.

The interim government, sworn in on 8 August 2024 with Muhammad Yunus as chief adviser, governed without a parliament for eighteen months. On 5 August 2025 it read out a July Declaration and set the general election for February 2026. The election was held on 12 February 2026. Britannica records that the Awami League did not take part because the interim government had banned all its activities.

How local government is organised

Bangladesh is a unitary state divided into eight divisions, each named after its headquarters: Barishal, Chattogram, Dhaka, Khulna, Mymensingh, Rajshahi, Rangpur and Sylhet. Below them sit 64 districts, then upazilas, and then union councils grouping villages; the Wikipedia country article counts 497 upazilas and 4,599 unions. There are no elected officials at division or district level, where administration is run by government officers.

Elections are held at the bottom, for a chairperson and members in each union or urban ward. Legislation in 1997 reserved three of the twelve seats on every union council for women. Local elections are not free of the national rivalry: more than 100 people were killed in clashes between Awami League and BNP supporters during the union council elections of 2016.

The Chittagong Hill Tracts have their own arrangement. An insurgency for autonomy ran from 1975 to 1997, and the peace accord signed in 1997 gave limited autonomy to an elected council for the three hill districts.

Who Bangladesh has aligned with abroad

Bangladesh joined the Commonwealth in 1972, the United Nations in 1974 after a first application was vetoed by China, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in 1974. It was a founding member of the Developing Eight, and Britannica credits Ziaur Rahman's regional diplomacy with leading to the founding of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in 1985. Dhaka hosts the secretariat of BIMSTEC, the Bay of Bengal grouping.

The relationship with India is the closest and the most contested. India's army fought on the Bengali side in 1971; the Ganges water dispute went to the UN in 1976 and was settled by treaty under the government of 1996 to 2001; the Teesta and killings of Bangladeshi civilians at the border remain grievances. Relations with Pakistan are complicated by Pakistan's refusal to accept responsibility for the killings of 1971. Relations with Myanmar have been strained since more than 700,000 Rohingya crossed into Bangladesh from 2017, and Bangladesh has demanded their right of return to Arakan.

The armed forces, inherited from the British Indian Army, numbered about 230,000 active personnel in 2024, and military spending came to 1.3% of GDP, US$4.3 billion, in 2021. Bangladesh ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2019.