What is Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami party? Could it lead the country next?
Al Jazeera
For first time in its chequered history, the party has a real chance of grabbing power as the leader of ruling alliance.
Dhaka, Bangladesh – For the first time in his life, Abdur Razzak, a 45-year-old banker in Bangladesh’s Faridpur district, believes the political party he supports has a real chance of coming to power as the leader of a governing alliance.
Campaigning for the Jamaat-e-Islami party’s “scales” symbol in his town, Razzak said people he was meeting with were “united in voting” for Jamaat, as the Islamist party is commonly referred to in the world’s eighth-most populous country, home to the fourth-largest Muslim population on the planet.
Bangladesh is scheduled to hold a general election on February 12, the first vote since a student-led uprising toppled longtime former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government in August 2024.
The interim government headed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, which succeeded Hasina after the uprising, banned her Awami League party. This has made the upcoming election a bipolar contest between the frontrunner, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), and an electoral alliance forged by the Jamaat with the National Citizen Party (NCP), a group formed by student leaders of the 2024 uprising along with other Islamist parties.
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