Young women celibrate casting their votes in Thursday’s election with a selfie showing their inked thumbs outside a polling station at Dhaka Government Muslim High School in Dhaka, Photo by Monirul Alam/EPA
Feb. 13 (UPI) — The Bangladesh Nationalist Party secured a resounding victory on Friday, winning a more than two-thirds majority in the country’s first election since the previous administration was toppled by mass anti-government protests in 2024.
With vote counting almost complete, the BNP won 212 of the 300 seats being elected to parliament, putting party chairman Tarique Rahman on track to become prime minister.
Just under 60% of the 127 million people eligible to vote turned out in Thursday’s poll.
An 11-party coalition led by the previously banned Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Muslim party, came in some way behind, winning 77 seats so far, amid allegations of irregularities in the way the election was run, despite the performance being its strongest ever.
Jamaat-e-Islami said there had been “repeated inconsistencies and fabrications in unofficial result announcements,” while the banned Awami League of exiled former prime minister Sheik Hasina questioned how an election without the opposition could be free and fair.
Hasina, who fled to India in 2024 after a brutal crackdown on protests by her security forces killed as many as 1,400 people, was sentenced to dea