By Gitika Sharma
On Sunday, the newly formed student-led National Citizen Party (NCP) collaborated with an offshoot of Jamaat-e-Islami and another pressure group to form a bloc before the upcoming election in Bangladesh in February.
NCP, established this year in February and backed by interim government Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, is a political party for Students Against Discrimination (SAD), which spearheaded the violent street movement that ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government on August 5, 2024.
The NCP formed the alliance with the Amar Bangladesh (AB) Party, an offshoot of the right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami group, and the Rashtra Songskar Andolon. “We will name our alliance the Gonotantrik Sangskar Jote,” NCP convener Nahid Islam said during a press conference.
The forthcoming polls, Mr Islam claimed, would not be a typical type of election but rather “a political transformation for economic liberation”, affirming that the alliance is driven to create a “new Bangladesh”.
The AB Party, which formed in 2020, split from Jamaat-e-Islami over ideological disagreements. Bangladesh’s largest Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has recently assembled a coalition of eight Islamist organisations to better unite like-minded political parties before elections.
The interim government had dissolved Ms Hasina’s Awami League, leaving the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is under the leadership of the critically ill former prime minister Khaleda Zia, the current frontrunner in the political landscape.
The new alliance is emblematic of a general shift in Bangladesh’s post-Hasina political landscape, with student-led movements increasingly moving their forms from street activism to formal political participation, political analysts say. The addition of an Islamist-rooted faction to a coalition led by youth activists also signals the pragmatic, not ideological, character of current electoral alliances, observers added.
Public response has been ambivalent about the coalition. Proponents insist that the bloc represents a viable alternative to the traditional power structures that have dominated power for decades with the Awami League and BNP.
But critics have worried about the alliance’s ideological contradictions and the Jamaat faction’s controversial political legacy. To many voters, in particular young people, the next few months will be seen as a trial of whether the coalition can translate its protest momentum into a credible governing vision.