Nahid Islam and the uneasy alliance that could shape Bangladesh’s vote

The young leader of the protest-born National Citizen Party has teamed up with Jamaat-e-Islami to contest elections.

Nahid Islam was just 26 when he stepped up to a microphone at Dhaka’s Shaheed Minar, a national monument, on August 3, 2024, and uttered a single rallying cry: “Hasina must go.”

Student-led demonstrations had begun weeks earlier over a government job quota system that reserved a large share of coveted civil-service posts for special groups, including descendants of 1971 liberation war veterans, leaving too few merit-based opportunities for everyone else.

When then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government moved to crush the protesters with lethal force, the backlash only swelled – turning a youth-led revolt into a nationwide movement that, within days, brought down her regime.

Islam was one of the figures at the forefront of Bangladesh’s revolution: A young sociology student in a plain shirt, Bangladesh’s green-and-red flag tied around his head, speaking for a generation that felt locked out of power – and later a brief stint as cabinet adviser in Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus’s transitional government.

Now 27, he is standing in the February 12 election – not much older than the minimum age of 25 for parliamentary candidates under the nation’s constitution.