An election will decide whether democracy returns to Bangladesh

TARIQUE RAHMAN’S bulletproof bus rolls north out of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, slowing every couple of miles to give waiting fans a good look. Excited supporters dash into the road to take selfies as the politician’s convoy approaches. Women gather at the windows of textile mills. The man himself waves regally at the crowds for much of the four hours it takes to reach a rally in Mymensingh, a northern city. He will wave regally for much of the four hours it takes to go back.

Mr Rahman—the 60-year-old scion of a famous political family—is the front-runner to become Bangladesh’s prime minister after a general election on February 12th. That poll will be the first since a revolution 18 months ago, in which Gen-Z protesters overthrew the murderous and venal 15-year rule of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League. The return to democracy should improve law and order, reassure foreign and domestic investors and begin repairing Bangladesh’s fraught ties with India. Yet it seems unlikely to bring the wholesale political renewal the revolutionaries wanted.

Bangladesh has not run a proper election since the one in 2008 that brought Sheikh Hasina to power. Some 40% of the country’s 128m voters have never had a chance to cast a real ballot: “For two decades of my life, my votes never counted,” says Shafqat Munir of BIPSS, a think-tank in Dhaka. Now roads in the capital are festooned with campaign banners. To conform with new election rules, most have been printed in black and white.

Overseeing the election will be the final duty of Bangladesh’s caretaker government, led since the revolution by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel peace-prize laureate. Views on its performance vary wildly. But most people agree that it steadied an economy that was in freefall.

The interim government has worked with politicians to write reforms it hopes will prevent Bangladesh falling into fresh tyranny. They include creating a new upper house and limiting prime ministers to ten years in office. “Naysayers everywhere told me this process was going to fail because the parties will not talk to each other, they will scream at you, they will start throwing chairs,” says Ali Riaz, an academic who led the discussions. In fact almost all Bangladesh’s parties have backed the proposals. These will be put to voters in a referendum on election day.

Assuming they pass, making sure the changes are written into law will fall to whichever party ends up leading Bangladesh next. The Awami League is playing no part in the election after the interim government banned it. Yet the student activists who took the largest role in toppling it have struggled to form a united front. Instead the outfits that have done best during Bangladesh’s interregnum are two parties with long histories.

The most striking is Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist group. It was banned during Sheikh Hasina’s rule but has thrived since being unbanned after she fled to India. (India’s decision to offer her shelter has enraged Bangladeshis, one reason relations between the two countries have grown fraught.) More than 90% of Bangladeshis are Muslim; after years of misrule, many like the idea of more piety in politics. But much of Jamaat’s new support has come “in spite of being an Islamist party, not because of it”, reckons Thomas Kean of Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank. 

Jamaat insists it would rule moderately and for all Bangladeshis. Yet its advances are causing panic among the urban middle class. They note the party has not fielded a single female candidate. Jamaat has struggled to walk back a suggestion that it would like to limit the number of hours Bangladeshi women may work. Nor is it clear that the party—which has never before held more than 18 seats in parliament—is experienced enough to run the country. Some of its policies sound expensive and half-baked.

All this opens a door for Mr Rahman. His Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is leading in the polls. For years it was run by his late mother, Khaleda Zia; before that it was run by her husband, a Bangladeshi president who was assassinated in 1981. Under Zia, the BNP won power three times during the 1990s and 2000s, though its rule was often inglorious. In 2006 it looked like it was about to steal an election before the army intervened.

Mr Rahman did not formally serve in his mother’s governments, but most Bangladeshis saw him as a power within. Leaked American diplomatic cables, written in 2008 and 2009, alleged that he “was widely considered one of the most corrupt individuals in Bangladesh”, and that he was “notorious for flagrantly and frequently demanding bribes”. When Sheikh Hasina’s government took office and began battering opponents, it pressed charges against Mr Rahman—who by that time had fled for Britain. He stayed in self-imposed exile in London for 17 years, flying back to Bangladesh only in December.

Quizzed aboard his campaign bus, Mr Rahman defends his party’s record. When last in office, he insists, it began bringing corruption to heel. He denies allegations of past wrongdoing, saying charges brought by Sheikh Hasina’s regime were trumped up. Since the revolution, Bangladesh’s newly independent courts have overturned his convictions. That is in part what has permitted him to come home.

He promises, without giving details, that if elected his party will support investors to create jobs. He says he wants more young Bangladeshis to get training that might help them find high-paying work abroad. He promises to dig 20,000km of canals to solve water shortages, and to plant 50m trees a year. He thinks he will get on with Donald Trump: America’s president is “quite practical, quite pragmatic—he’s a businessman”.

Above all, says Mr Rahman, his new government will ensure freedom of speech, maintain order and bear down on graft. He says people responsible for killing protesters in 2024 must face justice. But he insists he will not use the powers of the state to go after political rivals. The revolution shows what can happen to governments that “do not have a programme for the people”, he argues. “Being vengeful does not do anyone any good.”

Bangladesh’s business leaders and most of its liberals lend Mr Rahman their support. Since returning to the country he has said much of what they want to hear (though most still choose to talk off the record, in case the other side wins). Observers say the man who has come back from London seems different from the one they knew before. In any case, the alternatives are deeply unappealing, notes one pragmatic local analyst. The choice, he says, is between Bangladesh getting a forward-looking government or ending up with one that is “Taliban-lite”. ■