(Dhaka) Residents of Bangladesh began voting on Sunday morning for legislative elections guaranteed to offer a fifth term to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has described the country’s main opposition party as a “terrorist organization”.
The vote is boycotted by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the main opposition force, which denounces “a sham election” and other parties, decimated in recent months by a massive wave of arrests.
Polling stations in the world’s eighth most populous country will remain open until 5 p.m. (7 a.m. Eastern) and results are expected around midnight.
“The BNP is a terrorist organization,” Mr.me Hasina to reporters after voting in the capital Dhaka.
“I am doing my best to ensure that democracy continues in this country,” the Prime Minister said. “The elections will be free and fair,” she assured.
The country, once plagued by extreme poverty, has seen accelerated growth under the leadership of Mr.me Hasina. But his government has also been accused of systematic human rights violations and a ruthless repression of the opposition.
The Awami League, the prime minister’s party, has practically no opponents in the constituencies it is contesting. But it failed to present candidates in a few of them, in an apparent attempt to avoid the unicameral Parliament being seen as the instrument of a single party.
Some voters say they were threatened with confiscation of their government benefit cards, necessary to obtain social benefits, if they refused to vote for the Awami League.
“They told me they would confiscate it if I didn’t vote,” Lal Mia, 64, who is voting in Faridpur district, in the center of the country, told AFP. “They said that since the government feeds us, we must vote for it.”
The opposition organized protests last year to demand the resignation of the prime minister and promote a neutral interim government to oversee the elections, but without success. She is calling for a general strike this weekend.
Arrests
On Saturday, police arrested seven BNP members, including a senior party official in Dhaka, on charges of sabotage following a fire the day before on a crowded commuter train that killed at least four people and injured eight.
Several fires have taken place since last year on the railway network and Sheikh Hasina has accused the BNP of being behind them.
These acts are planned by the government “to discredit the BNP, a non-violent movement” and “distract people’s attention from this parody of elections”, the spokesperson for the opposition party told AFP , AKM Wahiduzzaman.
Some 25,000 opposition leaders, including all local BNP leaders, were arrested in a wave of repression that followed last year’s protests, when several people were killed in clashes with the police, according to the party. The government, for its part, reported 11,000 arrests.
170 million inhabitants
The political scene in the country of 170 million people has long been dominated by the rivalry between Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of the country’s founder, and Khaleda Zia, a two-time prime minister and wife of a former military leader.
Since his return to power in 2009, Mr.me Hasina, 76, strengthened her control after two elections marred by irregularities and accusations of fraud.
Convicted of corruption in 2018, Khaleda Zia, 78, is detained in a hospital in the capital Dhaka due to her poor health.
His son Tarique Rahman leads the BNP in his place from London, where he has lived in exile since 2008, after several convictions in his country.
Bangladesh’s security forces have long been accused of excessive use of force, something the government denies.
The United States, Bangladesh’s largest export market, has sanctioned an elite police unit and its commanders, accused of numerous extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances.
The success of her economic policy has long guaranteed Sheikh Hasina’s popularity. But difficulties have multiplied recently, with rising prices for most basic goods and widespread power outages in 2022.
The refusal of wage increases demanded by textile workers, a sector which generates 85% of the country’s $55 billion in annual exports, triggered social unrest at the end of 2023, with factories burned and hundreds of others closed.
The government is “less popular than a few years ago, but Bangladeshis have few real options at the polling station,” notes Pierre Prakash of the International Crisis Group. These frustrations could portend political violence later, he believes. “It’s a potentially dangerous combination.”