Bangladesh heads to the polls Thursday in a high-stakes general election that will shape the nation’s transition following the 2024 student-led revolution that ended Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule.

All but one of 300 seats in parliament are up for grabs in a contest that has coalesced around two rival blocs: the mainstream Bangladesh Nationalist Party and an unlikely alliance of student leaders and Islamist groups.

The vote will test whether one of the first “Gen Z” political movements can translate into electoral success, or whether voters hand power back to the establishment. The BNP, which governed Bangladesh before Hasina, is widely expected to win the most seats, though it remains unclear whether it can secure an outright majority.

“The BNP’s status as one of the two dynastic forces that have defined Bangladesh’s troubled post-independence politics underlines how precarious the reform momentum could prove,” said Joseph Parkes, senior analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft.

For global investors and policymakers, the election will signal whether Bangladesh can restore stability and growth and remain a reliable partner in a region where India, China and the U.S. vie for influence.

The winner will inherit an economy besieged by persistently high inflation and global trade upheavals that threaten the garment industry, which accounts for more than 80% of exports. It will also face mounting law-and-order risks that could derail its agenda.

After Yunus

Voting is set to begin at 7:30 a.m. Dhaka time and close at 4:30 p.m., with results expected by Friday.

More than 127 million registered voters are eligible to cast ballots across 42,766 polling centers. While the BNP is widely seen as the front-runner, it faces stiff competition from the alliance between Jamaat-e-Islami — the nation’s largest Islamist party — and the student-led National Citizen Party. In total, 51 political parties and about 2,000 candidates are competing.

The winner will succeed the interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.

The gravity of the moment was visible in the exodus this week from Dhaka, the bustling capital, as millions of residents crowded into buses, ferries and trains to reach their hometowns to vote. Among them was Mohammad Shah Alam, a 41-year-old Uber driver in Dhaka, who traveled to the central district of Faridpur to vote for the first time since 2008.

“The race would be more inclusive with the participation of the Awami League,” Alam said, referring to Hasina’s party, which was banned from the election by Yunus’s government last year. The ousted leader now lives in exile in India, a situation that has become a serious source of tension between the two countries.

Law and order

Political violence has risen in the months leading up to the vote. In response, the interim government has ordered what it describes as the largest security deployment in the country’s history, mobilizing nearly 1 million personnel, including about 100,000 members of the army.

Also on the ballot Thursday is a referendum on a broad reform package that includes a 10-year cap on the prime minister’s tenure and the introduction of a 100-member upper house of parliament.

Hasina fled Bangladesh in August 2024 after a wave of student protests against her rule turned violent, and a crackdown by security forces left as many as 1,400 people dead, according to the United Nations. A tribunal in Bangladesh sentenced Hasina to death in absentia in November last year for crimes against humanity.

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