Bangladesh votes after uprising: BNP wins big (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Welcome to the Global News Podcast on YouTube, where we go behind the headlines. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway, and today we're asking what next for Bangladesh after the first election since that huge student uprising in 2024. We're joined from the Bangladeshi capital by our correspondent Azadeh Mashiri. And Azadeh, first of all, let's put this election in context. Remind us of this long-running and bitter rivalry between these two power blocs, the BNP, the Bangladesh National Party, and the Awami League.

[00:00:33] Speaker 2: Yes, the Awami League has now been replaced by its arch-rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, because these two parties have dominated politics for decades in the country. And both of them were headed by two women for a very long time. Khaleda Zia of the BNP, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and, in fact, Tariq Rahman's late mother, as well as Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League, who, of course, was toppled in that student uprising in 2024, the reason why all of this was even possible. Now, the two shared a lot of enmity, and they both represented political dynasties. Sheikh Hasina's father was considered the founder of Bangladesh. The father of the nation is often what he would be called, and that's because of the War of Independence and the leading role he had, as did the party, the Awami League. Khaleda Zia's late husband, Zia-ul-Rahman, was president and leader of the country, and he was later assassinated in a military coup. And so the legacy of both these men is what allowed these two women to then rise up, enter politics, and dominate it for so long. But they were bitter enemies, and that meant that Khaleda Zia had multiple corruption charges against her. She alleged that these were politically motivated under Awami League rule, as did Sheikh Hasina suffer when the BNP government was in power as well, because even though this is a party that has now arrived at a time when people were calling for change and overthrew a government that had unleashed a brutal crackdown on young protesters, the BNP is very much an older, established party.

[00:02:19] Speaker 1: Yeah, so August 2024, the Awami League thrown out, Sheikh Hasina flees. Then fast forward to the elections this week, the BNP back in power. Take us through the results.

[00:02:32] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a huge turnaround for Tariq Rahman, because in the last elections he was in self-imposed exile in London. He only returned in December after 17 years of self-imposed exile. The BNP had boycotted those elections because thousands of their members and their supporters were jailed. And so for him to now be the next prime minister of Bangladesh is a huge reversal in his fortunes. But not only that, when you look at the results, the BNP won by a landslide. They won more than two-thirds of the contested seats. Jamaat-e-Islami came second. And that is very significant because Jamaat-e-Islami also suffered under Sheikh Hasina's rule. They were banned for years. Many of their politicians were also jailed. Some were hanged. And yet now they have more than 70 seats in this election. That's a huge reversal for a party that at best had won 12 percent of the vote. There is also a third contender here that is very important, and that's the National Citizen Party, or NCP. They were a new party, and they were formed about seven or eight months ago by the faces of the uprising, the students who made this all possible. And so they hoped that they would be able to stand on their two feet and lead the country into this change. But they really struggled with support, a new party in a country where two parties had dominated politics for so long. And so they entered a very controversial alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, that Islamist party. And so dozens of their members resigned, saying that's not what they really signed up for, especially certain women who were very concerned by Jamaat-e-Islami, an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami and what that would mean for women in the country.

[00:04:27] Speaker 1: Now, against that backdrop of long domination by these two political parties, this election was described as the most competitive for years. But how is that possible when the Awami League was banned?

[00:04:41] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a complicated one, isn't it? On the one hand, you travel across the country, as our team has in the past few weeks. We've been on the campaign trail and we've gone to several areas where most voters will tell you this is the first time that they felt they could vote freely, especially when you got near to polling day. You were seeing rival banners of parties on all these streets. You saw rival activists in the same neighborhoods fighting for every vote. And more importantly, no one felt like they really knew the result. Even if you talked about frontrunners and Tariq Rahman and the rise of the DNP after all those years of suffering, you really weren't sure whether it was going to be a victory, let alone a landslide. And that was a huge, overwhelming feeling for people. In fact, when I'd speak to some voters, they would say, when I'd ask them about issues, they weren't so much concerned about the economy and unemployment, though that would come up because Bangladesh does have very big challenges. But overwhelmingly, the first thing they would say is, we want freedom. We want an end to corruption. And so it was a competitive race. And it was, to them, a very free race. Now, was it fair, as Mohammed Yunus, the interim leader, had promised? That is an altogether different question because, as you mentioned, the Awami League was banned from contesting. The interim government and the election commission, when pressed about it, told us that this was because of an anti-terrorism law. And they argue that these elections couldn't be free and fair if they weren't able to participate. That's what one Awami League politician in hiding told me when I went to visit him. And we're keeping his identity private because so many of their politicians are in hiding. Sheikha Sinha herself is in exile in India. And then when we traveled to certain other areas like Gopalganj, which is an Awami League stronghold where so many of the supporters live, you get this sense that there are a lot of people there that are completely disenfranchised now and that surely feel cast aside when the party that they would have chosen wasn't even on the ballot.

[00:06:50] Speaker 1: Now, after months of unrest and economic disruption, there are plenty of challenges. The BNP has a big majority. What will be its priorities?

[00:07:02] Speaker 2: The biggest priority will link to another vote that happened on polling day, and that's the referendum, the July charter referendum. And the big goal of that was to put a lot of checks and balances in place so that there would be an end to corruption, so that there would be this check on the executive that many people here felt didn't exist before. And so, for example, you would limit prime ministerial term limits. There would be an upper house of 100 members created, and the judiciary would also be strengthened to be made more independent. And so Tariq Rahman will need to convince a lot of voters that he truly does represent change. That is the message that was out there on the campaign trail. We saw that repeated, but the BNP, as we've discussed, does have a long history. There were people who didn't vote for him, and certainly there are the Awami League supporters who did not vote for him. So he'll need to unite the country. He will need to restore some political stability in the country. He'll want to make sure law and order seems stable here as well, so that not only some foreign investment is willing to come back in, but that businesses create more jobs to help people. So there are a range of economic issues he needs to handle, to tackle, including inflation, rising prices, salaries that just aren't keeping up with the price of basic goods and foods. It's a lot on his plate.

[00:08:25] Speaker 1: Now, Tariq Rahman, the son of not one but two former leaders, is continuing a political dynasty. After all the optimism of the uprising in 2024, how are people in Bangladesh feeling today?

[00:08:40] Speaker 2: It's really complicated for the students in particular, because they were asked...