by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh was all but guaranteed a fourth consecutive term in office when voting ended Sunday in a low-turnout election that has been marred by a widespread crackdown on the opposition.
Security remained tight across the country of 170 million people as the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which boycotted the election as unfair, pushed for a nationwide strike. The situation had remained tense in the days leading up to the vote, with violence (including an arson attack on a train in Dhaka that killed four people and the burning of more than a dozen polling stations) reported across the country. .
Hasina, 76, who cast her vote in Dhaka, the capital, shortly after polls opened at 8 a.m. local time, urged people to come out in large numbers.
During the election campaign, he has called for political stability and continuity, often citing the country’s violent history of coups and countercoups, including one that killed his father, Bangladesh’s founding leader, in the 1970s. He has highlighted his efforts to defend economic development and his secular party’s resistance to rising Islamist militancy as reasons why voters should and will give him another term.
“We have fought hard for this right to vote: jail, oppression, grenades, bombs,” Hasina told reporters after casting her vote. “These elections will be free and fair.”
But with the results announced and the election largely one-sided, there appeared to be little enthusiasm on the streets for the vote.
“I didn’t go to my hometown to vote because what difference would my vote make?” said Mominul Islam, a rickshaw driver in Dhaka.
Visits to polling centers in Dhaka showed that voting was slow. Members of the ruling Awami League party milled outside polling stations, but voters simply arrived slowly. Local media reported cases where members of the ruling party lined up their supporters when cameras and foreign election observers He arrived at a polling station, but the people dispersed afterwards.
There seemed to be some confusion around the official figures on voter turnout.
As of 3:00 p.m. local time, voter turnout was around 27 percent, according to Jahangir Alam, secretary of Bangladesh’s election commission. An hour later, after voting closed, Kazi Habibul Awal, the chief election commissioner, said at a news conference in Dhaka that the vote was hovering around a “national average of around 28 percent.” Other officials at the news conference quickly corrected him and said it was around 40 percent.
“This 40 percent is reliable,” Awal said, before adding that the numbers could still go up or down once the votes were counted and that he did not “understand this math.”
With the main opposition boycotting it, the competition – still tense and in many constituencies marked by violence – is largely between members of Hasina’s own party.
While Hasina’s officials tried to downplay the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s boycott of the vote, pointing out that smaller parties were still participating, her moves in the final stretch of the campaign made it clear that she was concerned about the legitimacy of the vote. She ordered her party to support what became known as fictitious candidates: members of the Awami League who ran as independent candidates against the official candidates of her own party.
It was an effort not only to create the appearance of contention, but also to shore up voter turnout that could lend some legitimacy to the election, analysts said.
But with power so centralized and so much economic and political fortune at stake in a parliamentary bid, the result has been bitter party fights in many of the constituencies, including violent clashes. In at least two constituencies, Awami League candidates have accused opponents of their own party for the deaths of their followers.
“The ruling party had long been trying to dismantle the main opposition party, the BNP, and attract some of its people to its side. This would have shown that there was some kind of participation of different parties, especially the BNP, in the elections,” said Ali Riaz, a political scientist and professor at Illinois State University, using an abbreviation for Bangladesh Nationalist Party. “When they didn’t have much success in this, they had to choose this path.”
Riaz said the way the elections unfolded made it clear that Bangladesh was no longer “an effective multi-party system.”
“I say effective because there may be offices with signs, but there will be no effective opposition,” Riaz said. “Not on paper, but in practice Bangladesh will become a one-party state.”
After winning a competitive election held under a neutral caretaker government in 2009, Hasina has set out to turn Bangladesh into a one-party state, analysts and critics say. He changed the Constitution to make the practice of holding elections under a neutral administration illegal and won two additional terms (in 2014 and 2018) in votes marked by boycotts and opposition irregularities.
Ms. Hasina first moved to crush the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, effectively banning its political work and prosecuting several of its top leaders for violence and treason during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence. More recently, their efforts have focused on the BNP, the main opposition party, which by now is so shattered that it retains little capacity for mobilization. Their leaders who are not yet in jail are bogged down with endless judicial appointments.
For much of the past 15 years, Hasina’s second time in power after a five-year term that ended in 2001, an economic success story diverted attention from her autocratic turn.
Thanks to investments in the textile industry, Bangladesh experienced such impressive growth that average income levels at one point surpassed those of India. The country also saw significant improvements in education, health, female labor force participation, and climate disaster preparedness.
It has also played a difficult balancing act in a tough neighborhood, where both China and India compete for influence. Hasina has managed to keep India and China on her side.
As Western pressures mounted on his government over human rights abuses, including a crackdown on the opposition and enforced disappearances by Bangladesh’s elite security agencies, both Beijing and New Delhi have come to his defense. . India, in particular, has been using its growing diplomatic clout to urge the United States and other Western nations to take it easy on Hasina, diplomats in New Delhi and Dhaka said.
As Hasina prepared to seek a fourth consecutive term, the shine of the economic success story was fading, with the population struggling against rising prices. While he could rein in a decimated opposition through his control of security agencies and the judiciary, the task will become much more difficult if public anger over rising prices continues and he fails to stop the economy’s downward spiral. .
The successive blows of the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which pushed up fuel and food prices, have exposed Bangladesh’s over-reliance on one industry. The country’s foreign exchange reserves have been dwindling, forcing it to seek emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund.
Opposition leaders sought to tap into public anger over the economy and held their first major rallies in years, prompting Hasina to intensify the crackdown. The BNP says more than 20,000 of its members have been arrested since its last major rally in October, in which they faced police batons and tear gas.
“They are playing with the country’s ambition to be a democratic state,” BNP leader Nazrul Islam Khan said on the eve of the vote. “We will continue the movement until the government falls.”
