For many of his grownup life, Rafiul Alam didn’t imagine that voting was definitely worth the stroll to the polling station. He’s 27, grew up in a middle-class neighbourhood of Dhaka, and have become eligible to vote almost a decade in the past. He by no means did – not in Bangladesh’s nationwide elections in 2018, nor within the 2024 vote.
“My vote had no actual worth,” he mentioned.
Like many Bangladeshis in his age group, Alam’s political consciousness fashioned underneath former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s lengthy interval of presidency, when opposition events and election watchdogs repeatedly questioned the credibility of polls.
Over time, he mentioned, disengagement with politics grew to become regular, even rational, for a era. “You develop up figuring out elections exist, however believing they really don’t have the facility to resolve something. So you set your vitality elsewhere… research, work, even making an attempt to depart the nation,” he mentioned.
This calculation started to shift for him in July 2024, when scholar protests over a authorities job reservation system favouring sure teams spiralled right into a nationwide rebellion. Alam joined marches in Dhaka’s Mirpur space and helped coordinate logistics for protests, as Hasina’s safety forces launched a brutal crackdown.
The United Nations Human Rights Workplace later estimated that as much as 1,400 individuals – most of them younger – might have been killed earlier than Hasina fled to India on August 5, 2024, ending almost 15 years in energy.
When Hasina left, Alam mentioned the second felt like one thing that had appeared everlasting had damaged. “For the primary time, it felt like strange individuals may push for a change,” he mentioned. “When you expertise that, you are feeling accountable for what comes subsequent.”
Bangladesh is now heading for a nationwide election on February 12, the primary for the reason that rebellion. European Union observers have described the upcoming vote because the “greatest democratic course of in 2026, anyplace”. And Alam plans to vote for the primary time.
“I’m thrilled to train my misplaced proper as a citizen,” he mentioned.
He isn’t alone. Bangladesh has about 127 million registered voters, almost 56 million of them between the ages of 18 and 37, in accordance with the Election Fee. They represent about 44 p.c of the citizens, and are a demographic broadly seen because the driving drive behind Hasina’s downfall.
“Virtually talking, anybody who turned 18 after the 2008 parliamentary election has by no means had the possibility to vote in a aggressive ballot,” mentioned Humayun Kabir, director basic of the Election Fee’s nationwide identification registration wing.
“Meaning individuals who have been unable to vote for the final 17 years at the moment are of their mid-30s… and particularly desperate to solid their ballots.”
This eagerness comes after three post-2008 elections that “weren’t thought of credible”, Ivars Ijabs, the EU’s chief observer, mentioned.
The 2014 polls noticed a mass opposition boycott, and dozens of seats the place Hasina’s Awami League social gathering confronted no contest. The 2018 vote, although contested, grew to become broadly generally known as the “evening’s vote”, after allegations that poll containers had been crammed earlier than polling day.
The 2024 election, in the meantime, once more went forward amid a serious boycott by opposition events, with critics arguing that situations for a “truthful contest didn’t exist”.
A pivotal citizens
Fragmented by class, geography, faith and expertise, Bangladesh’s younger voters are united much less by ideology than by a shared suspicion of establishments, which, for many of their grownup lives, have did not symbolize them, say analysts.
“There’s a vital age hole between pre–Hasina regime voters and new voters,” mentioned Fahmidul Haq, a author and college member at Bard School in New York and a former professor on the College of Dhaka. “Due to the character of elections underneath the Hasina administration, we have no idea the precise degree of public acceptance of the political events.”
Because of this, he mentioned, the present cohort of first-time voters will play a decisive position in shaping the long run path of politics in Bangladesh. Haq described the upcoming election as a psychological launch valve after years of repression, throughout which younger individuals “couldn’t maintain their representatives accountable; relatively, these representatives appeared to them as oppressors”.
Many younger individuals nonetheless don’t belief the present system, Haq argued, and a few stay sceptical of the democratic transition itself.
Umama Fatema, a Dhaka College scholar who emerged as a outstanding chief through the 2024 protests, mentioned the rebellion generated highly effective expectations amongst younger individuals: guarantees of “no corruption, no manipulation, equality of alternative and political reform”.
However translating these aspirations into establishments has confirmed far tougher. Because the transition unfolded, Fatema mentioned the reform course of, led by the interim administration of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, alongside manoeuvring by political events – together with these born out of 2024’s protests – grew to become more and more advanced.
“Only a few individuals and their aspirations have been meaningfully concerned and included,” she mentioned.
A fraught alliance
With the Awami League barred from political exercise by the interim Yunus authorities, the election has become a battle between two rival coalitions: one led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Occasion (BNP), and the opposite by Jamaat-e-Islami.
For a lot of younger protesters, this end result cuts towards the spirit of 2024.
Pantho Saha, a 22-year-old scholar from the Cumilla district within the nation’s southeast, mentioned many with whom he protested in 2024 had hoped the leaders who emerged from the rebellion would break what he described because the “standard dynastic” patterns.
That expectation started to fracture, he mentioned, when the Nationwide Citizen Occasion (NCP), a youth-led formation born out of the protest motion, moved in direction of an electoral alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami. A far-right Islamist social gathering, the Jamaat’s opposition to Bangladesh’s independence through the 1971 conflict has lengthy restricted its mainstream attraction.
“Traditionally, those that rule us come to energy with huge guarantees,” Saha mentioned. “However after just a few years, energy blinds them, and the identical abuses repeat.”
The NCP, he mentioned, initially felt totally different. “We considered the NCP as a beacon of sunshine. However seeing it align with a celebration that carries a lot historic baggage made many people lose hope.”
Fatema, who led the protests alongside a number of figures who later based the NCP, mentioned the social gathering’s alignment with the Jamaat dangers shrinking the importance of the July 2024 rebellion. “Over time, it may significantly harm how this rebellion is remembered in historical past,” she warned.
The NCP positioned itself at its launch as a generational different to Bangladesh’s conventional events, promising what it known as a “new political settlement” rooted within the 2024 July motion. However as talks superior over the electoral alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, the social gathering noticed a wave of resignations, together with from a number of senior figures and girls leaders who had been anticipated to contest parliamentary seats. Lots of them have since introduced impartial bids, saying the social gathering was “drifting from its founding commitments”.
Nahid Islam, the NCP’s chief, has defended the alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, describing it as a “strategic electoral association aimed toward higher unity”, relatively than an ideological alignment.
Between hope and politics
Even so, the February 12 poll carries specific weight for a lot of youthful Bangladeshis who helped drive final 12 months’s rebellion.
Moumita Akter, 24, a grasp’s scholar at Chittagong College who took half within the anti-Hasina protests, described the vote as “step one to revive a minimum of essentially the most primary democratic practices”.
“I don’t count on miracles from a single vote. However I wish to see whether or not the system can a minimum of operate correctly. That alone can be a serious change,” she mentioned.
For others, like Sakibur Rahman, 23, a voter from the jap Brahmanbaria district who research philosophy on the College of Dhaka, the attraction of democracy stays conditional.
“You possibly can discuss democracy all day, but when individuals don’t really feel secure, can’t converse freely and may’t earn a residing, democracy feels summary, he instructed Al Jazeera.
Rahman mentioned he would assist whichever social gathering may credibly assure public security, freedom of expression, spiritual freedom, and minorities residing with out worry.
For a lot of ladies voters, the calculation is sharper nonetheless. Ladies make up almost half of Bangladesh’s citizens, however younger ladies say questions of dignity and on a regular basis safety will form their poll.
“We hear guarantees of girls’s rights, however the lived actuality is way from splendid. That may form what number of of my feminine pals will vote,” Akter, the grasp’s scholar, mentioned.
But the political discipline they’re being requested to select from stays overwhelmingly male. Election Fee information exhibits that solely 109 of the two,568 candidates contesting the election, or about 4.24 p.c, are ladies.
Fatema mentioned the political area for girls has narrowed relatively than expanded for the reason that rebellion. “After August 5, ladies who discuss their company, their contributions, and their proper to illustration have been suppressed in some ways,” she mentioned.
“Harassment, from on-line abuse to sexual threats, has grow to be routine in political areas.” These pressures are pushing ladies out of seen political roles, simply because the nation enters a important political transition, she added.
Mubashar Hasan, a political observer and adjunct researcher at Western Sydney College’s Humanitarian and Growth Analysis Initiative, mentioned the disconnect between ladies’s prominence in protest actions and their marginalisation in formal politics raises doubts in regards to the depth of reform.
“No structural change is feasible with out ladies’s political illustration, and participation on the highest ranges… each in parliament and in policymaking,” he mentioned. “With out that, guarantees of any new political order stay incomplete.”
Fahmidul Haq of Bard School mentioned political events must strategy younger voters otherwise than up to now, by addressing “their traumas, wishes, and calls for sincerely”, and by campaigning with honesty and transparency.
“Younger individuals are deeply sceptical of absurd guarantees,” he mentioned, including that these might in truth alienate them.
Nonetheless, one thing basic has modified. For Alam, the first-time voter from Dhaka’s Mirpur, July 2024 completely altered how his era pertains to energy.
“We now dare to query everybody,” he mentioned. “Whoever involves energy, that behavior received’t disappear.”
