(Adnkronos) – Bangladesh votes on Thursday for general elections and a referendum on reforms. These are the first consultations since the 2024 student uprising, also known as the July revolution, marking the end of the Sheikh Hasina era. And it’s the ‘debut’ of postal voting. Bangladeshi citizens abroad who have registered, over 700,000 people according to local media, are also voting.
“Everything is ready – said Abdur Rahmanel Masud from the Electoral Commission, quoted by the Dpa agency on the day the election campaign closed – Law enforcement personnel are deployed. No room for irregularities.” Local media report a record number of forces mobilized to ensure election security, approximately 900,000 units including police and military personnel.
The interim administration led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed Yunus is in power. For Yunus, the vote is a “historic opportunity to build a new Bangladesh”. Sheikh Hasina, forced to flee to India by the mobilization two years ago, has been sentenced to capital punishment, also for crimes against humanity in relation to the repression of protests two years ago – 1,400 deaths according to UN estimates – in a country with approximately 170 million inhabitants and 127 million voters.
Spotlight on the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by Tarique Rahman, son of former premier Khaleda Zia who died last December, and on the political force’s allies, opposed to the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami. But also on the National Citizens’ Party. The Awami League has been excluded from the vote. Voters are called to choose the 350 parliamentarians and also to express themselves on reforms, on amendments to the Constitution, the so-called ‘July Charter’.
The last elections, in January of last year, were those that gave Hasina a fourth consecutive term. Then in the summer, protests erupted. And for over a year, the interim government led by Yunus has been in power.
Tarique Rahman, 60 years old, after years of exile in London, returned at the end of last year to a country where the ‘July revolution’ was spearheaded by ‘Generation Z’ and where Thursday’s vote is considered decisive for the fate of the political transition. In December, Sharif Osman Hadi, one of the faces of the 2024 student uprising and a youth movement leader, was killed in an ambush in Dhaka. According to local media, 43% of voters are between 18 and 37 years old.
