When the rickshaw driver, Anwar Pagla, turned onto the road leading to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) office in Gulshan, Dhaka, the afternoon after the parliamentary elections, there was a small commotion. His rickshaw had a Bangladesh flag fixed on one side of the hood and the BNP flag on the other. Pagla is a fervent advocate.
“They call me crazy because I consider this match to be everything in my life. But it doesn't matter. We have won and Bangladesh will be better now,” he told Al Jazeera.
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Nearly two decades after its last government, the BNP returned to power after a landslide victory in Thursday's parliamentary elections.
The Electoral Commission published on Saturday the bulletin of the elected parliamentarians, the last official seal of the electoral process. The centre-right BNP alliance won 212 of the 300 seats. The alliance led by its main rival, Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh's largest religious party, scored 77.
Those elections came a year and a half after a nationwide protest movement toppled the country's former leaders and led to the deaths of 1,400 people in the streets. Bangladesh has been run by an interim government since Sheikh Hasina, who led the crackdown, fled the country.
BNP's Tarique Rahman, who will become Bangladesh's next prime minister, greeted his supporters on Friday and said he was “grateful for the love” they had shown him. He promised throughout the BNP campaign to restore democracy in Bangladesh.
Mahdi Amin, spokesperson for the BNP's election steering committee, said Rahman promised that as prime minister he would safeguard the rights and freedoms of citizens.
Thursday's vote took place largely peacefully and, despite alleging “inconsistencies and fabrications” during the vote count, the Jamaat accepted the result of Saturday's election.
The BNP had recently lost its former president, Khaleda Zia, Tarique Rahman's mother and two-time prime minister, who died on December 30.
Khaleda Zia had led the party to power in 1991 and again in 2001. Two decades later, her son returned the BNP to government.
That afternoon, at the party office in Gulshan, BNP activist Kamal Hossain was among a jubilant crowd. Visibly moved, he reflected on what he described as years of repression.
“For a long time I felt that Sheikh Hasina's regime would never go away,” he said. Referring to the July 2024 uprising that forced her to flee, she added: “Now the people have given us this mandate. We have taken back Bangladesh.”
Hossain said the new government's immediate priorities should be job creation and curbing inflation.
“Prices have been hurting us and there are too many young people unemployed. The government must address this immediately,” he said.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh's capital Dhaka remained unusually quiet on Friday.
The calm was largely intentional: the BNP decided not to hold victory processions.
The Jamaat headquarters in Moghbazar, the capital, also appeared subdued on Friday. Some fans at headquarters expressed disappointment.
“There has been engineering in the recount process and the media has been biased against the Jamaat alliance,” said Abdus Salam, a supporter near the office. He argued that a fair process would have generated more seats.
Others, like Muaz Abdullah, a Jamaat supporter in Germany, said the Jamaat's defeat was an organizational failure.
“In many constituencies, Jamaat did not conduct a good election campaign. In several places they did not even have proper polling agents,” he said.
Although the BNP and Jamaat were allies for years, they faced each other as rivals in these elections. The campaign period saw sporadic violence and months of divisive rhetoric online.
Sujan Mia, a BNP activist outside the party office, struck a conciliatory tone. “We don't want enmity. We should focus on building the nation,” he said.
Rezaul Karim Rony, editor of Joban magazine and a political analyst who closely followed the BNP campaign, said the party's victory would likely allay concerns of a rightward shift in Bangladesh.
“Through this election, the people, in a sense, have freed the country's politics from that risk,” he argued.
However, Rony warned that the real test begins now.
“The challenge is to ensure good governance, law and order and public safety, and establish a rights-based state,” he said, describing those goals as the “heart of the aspirations of the 2024 mass uprising.”
Michael Kugelman, senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, said a BNP victory represents “a blow to the politics of change that has galvanized Bangladesh since the mass uprising of 2024.”
“The BNP, dynastic and long saddled with accusations of corruption, reflects the principles that Generation Z protesters rejected,” he said.
The party will now face pressure from both the public and the opposition to move beyond old political habits, Kugelman added.
“If the new government resorts to repressive or retributive policies, reform advocates will be disappointed and democratization efforts will be set back,” he said.
The result could be the least disruptive for the region as a whole.
Pakistan might have preferred a Jamaat victory, given the party's historical affinity with Islamabad. But Pakistan has also had strong relations with the BNP, Kugelman noted, as has China.
And “India much prefers the BNP to the Jamaat,” he added, noting that the BNP is no longer allied with the Jamaat, which New Delhi believes takes positions contrary to its interests.
However, at the BNP office in Dhaka, geopolitics seemed distant.
Shamsud Doha, party leader, had brought his two grandchildren to share the moment.
“Nothing compares to this feeling,” he said. “We have long suffered under autocratic rule. Now is our time to build the nation.”
