Dhaka, Bangladesh – Bangladesh is holding its first contested presidential election in 35 years, with the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) candidate Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir pitted against former army officer Oli Ahmad, the nominee of the Jamaat-e-Islami-led 11-party opposition alliance. A total of 349 members of parliament are eligible to vote in the parliamentary chamber between and on Thursday, with the result expected hours later, according to Bangladesh’s Election Commission. The election was triggered by the resignation last month of Mohammed Shahabuddin, who was elected unopposed in 2023 as a nominee of ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League (AL) party.
He quit halfway through his five-year term after serving through Hasina’s removal in August 2024, the Muhammad Yunus-led interim administration, and the BNP’s return to power in February. Thursday’s vote will be the first contested presidential election since October 1991, when BNP candidate Abdur Rahman Biswas defeated AL nominee Badrul Haider Chowdhury by 172 votes to 92. Every presidential election since was uncontested.
The outcome, however, is widely seen as a foregone conclusion. Of the 349 lawmakers eligible to vote, 247 belong to the BNP and 90 to the Jamaat-led opposition alliance, giving Alamgir a decisive numerical advantage. Still, the vote carries symbolic significance for a country reshaping its institutions two years after the 2024 uprising that ended Hasina’s iron-fisted 15-year rule.
Alamgir, 78, is one of the BNP’s most prominent leaders. He became the acting secretary-general in 2011 and was formally appointed to the post in 2016, emerging as one of the party’s principal public faces during its long years in opposition under Hasina. After the BNP swept this year’s election, Alamgir became minister for local government, rural development and cooperatives.
At a BNP parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday, he thanked Prime Minister Tarique Rahman for nominating him and pledged not to compromise on Bangladesh’s independence and sovereignty. Rahman in turn urged BNP lawmakers to vote for Alamgir. Alamgir’s opponent, retired Colonel Ahmad, 85, is a decorated veteran of Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and a six-time member of parliament.
Once a close associate of former President Ziaur Rahman, the father of current Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, Ahmad joined the BNP in 1980 after leaving the army the year before. He served as communications minister under former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, and founded the LDP in 2006. Ahmad’s nomination is politically striking: his main backer, the Jamaat, had opposed Bangladesh’s independence in 1971 and sided with Pakistan during the war, while Ahmad fought in the Liberation War.
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