DHAKA – Bangladesh’ s new prime minister was sworn in on Tuesday after his party’s landslide win in parliamentary elections last week, the country’s first since the massive 2024 uprising and a vote billed as key to the nation's future political landscape after years of intense rivalry and disputed polls.
Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, whose term will last for five years, is the son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and former President Ziaur Rahman. He is also Bangladesh’s first male prime minister in 35 years. Since 1991, when Bangladesh returned to democracy, either Rahman's mother or her archrival Sheikh Hasina had served as prime ministers.
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The country’s figurehead President Mohammed Shahabuddin administered the oath of office for Rahman. Dozens of Cabinet members and members of the new government were also being sworn in on Tuesday.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its partners won 212 seats in the 350-memebr Parliament while an 11-party alliance led by the Jamaat-e-Islami party, the country’s largest Islamist party, won 77 seats to be the opposition.
A new party — the National Citizen Party, or NCP — formed by the student leaders who led the 2024 uprising was part of the 11-party alliance led by Jamaat-e-Islami. The NCP secured six seats.
In Bangladesh, voters elect 300 members of Parliament directly while the remaining 50 posts are reserved for women and distributed proportionately among the winning parties.
Rahman, 60, who returned to the country in December — after 17 years in self-exile in London and shortly before his mother’s death — has promised to work for democracy in Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people.
An interim government led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, that took over after Hasina was toppled, oversaw the election. The vote was largely peaceful and deemed as acceptable by international observers.
Foreign dignitaries and diplomats attended the ceremony Tuesday. Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu, Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay and an Indian delegation were among the guests, as well as dignitaries from Nepal, Sri Lanka and other countries.
Earlier on Tuesday morning, head of the election commission A.N.M. Nasir Uddin administered the oath of office separately to all the newly elected lawmakers.
But lawmakers from the BNP refused to take a second oath as members of a proposed Constitutional Reform Council in line with a referendum held simultaneously with Thursday's balloting. The interim government said the “Yes” side won the referendum and it made the arrangement with a set of reforms proposals to change the constitution keeping all the elected lawmakers as its members.
The referendum stemmed from a national charter in light of the uprising and major parties including the BNP signed it. Lawmakers elected from the Jamaat-e-Islami and its allies took the second oath, signaling complexity in the new Parliament.
The referendum refers political reforms that include prime ministerial term limits, stronger checks on executive power and other safeguards preventing parliamentary power consolidation. But critics say rising Islamists are pushing hard for its implementation while the referendum has some agenda that could even change the character of Bangladesh's largely secular constitution.
Rahman’s main rival Bangladesh Awami League party headed by Hasina — who was ousted in the 2024 mass uprising — was banned from the race. The Yunus-led administration also banned all activities of Hasina’s party, which had ruled the country for 15 years.
From her exile in India, where she has lived since Aug. 5, 2024, Hasina slammed the vote as unfair to her party, which still remains a major political force. At home, Hasina was sentenced to death on charges of crimes against humanity because of hundreds of deaths stemming from the uprising.
She denied the allegation and termed the court as a “kangaroo court.”