Zia herself, former first lady and twice prime minister, is under house arrest, while her son and designated heir Tarique Rahman is abroad evading capture. Their party has already announced that it does not recognize the legitimacy of Sunday’s vote.
Chief election commissioner Kazi Habibul Awal said Sunday’s turnout was around 40%, compared with 80% in the previous vote, when the BNP did not boycott the vote. By Monday morning, the Awami League had won 167 seats out of the 227 already allotted. Voting was on Sunday for 299 of the 350 seats in Parliament, or Jatiya Sangsad. The vote in one constituency was postponed due to the death of a candidate, while the 50 non-contestable seats were assigned to as many women by a special commission.
Sheikh Hasina is destined to go down in history as one of the most important political leaders of the young Asian nation born in 1971 from what, following the Partition of 1947, was East Pakistan. She is the daughter of the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who was assassinated, along with most of his family, in a coup d’état in 1975 and is by far the leader who has governed the country the longest.
His last 15 years in power were characterized by a series of successes in the economic field, especially in the textile industry, and by a regression from a democratic point of view. Today, Bangladeshis have a higher average per capita income than their Indian neighbors, but thousands of them are in prison because of their closeness to Hasina’s rival party. Or, as in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize winner and father of microcredit Muhammed Yunus, for the simple fact of being perceived by the leader as threats.
At an international political level, in recent years Hasina has gained acclaim for having welcomed thousands of refugees from the Rohingya ethnic group, a Muslim community discriminated against and fleeing from Myanmar, and for having simultaneously fought against radical Islamism.