Hasina Wins Elections as Opposition Rejects Polls
Officials declare massive victory for alliance led by PM Sheikh Hasina’s party, while opposition dubs polls ‘farcical’.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League (AL) party has won Bangladesh’s parliamentary vote, the country’s election commission has announced, after the main opposition alliance rejected the violencemarred polls. Three-hundred seats were up for grabs in the 350-member parliament, or Jatiya Sangshad, in Sunday’s elections. Another 50 seats are reserved for women.
An AL-led coalition on Sunday won 287 of the 298 seats for which results have been declared, while the main opposition alliance dominated by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) secured just six seats. A party needs 151 seats to form a government.
“My congratulations to the Awami League,” Helal Uddin Ahmed, secretary of the Election Commission Secretariat, said in a televised address as he read the results. Bangladesh’s ruling party had surged ahead within hours of the counting of the votes - an outcome the Jatiya Oikya Front, the BNP-led opposition alliance had feared.
In a hurriedly called news conference earlier on Sunday night, the leader of the Jatiya Oikya Front dubbed the election “farcical”.
“We reject the farcical election and want the election commission to hold a fresh election under a nonpartisan administration,” said Kamal Hossain, an 82-year-old jurist who wrote the country’s secular constitution.
Ms Hasina, who has headed the AL since 1981, went into the polls on the back of a decade of impressive GDP growth and booming garment exports. Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest exporter of garments after China.
The 71-year-old leader is set for a record fourth term in office in the South Asian Muslim-majority nation of 160 million.