Monday Briefing: Bangladesh’s Troubled Election

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh was nearly guaranteed a fourth consecutive term in office as voting ended in a low-turnout election yesterday.

Security remained tight as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main opposition, boycotted the election as unfair and pushed for a nationwide strike. In the days leading up to the vote, violence was reported across the country — including arson that killed four people on a train in Dhaka, the capital, and the torching of more than a dozen polling stations.

The opposition’s effort to protest the vote has been met with an intensified crackdown. More than 20,000 B.N.P. members and leaders have been arrested since the party’s last major rally, in October, according to party leaders and lawyers. Millions of the party’s members have been bogged down with court appointments.

Hasina’s officials tried to play down the B.N.P.’s boycott, but her moves in the final stretch of the campaign made clear that she was worried about the vote’s legitimacy. She instructed her party to prop up dummy candidates so it did not look as if it won unchallenged.

What’s next: “There is a risk of increased violence after the polls, from both sides,” said Pierre Prakash, the Asia director for the International Crisis Group. “If the B.N.P. feels the largely nonviolent strategy it deployed in the run-up to the 2024 election has failed, leaders could come under pressure to revert to the more overt violence of the past.”

And if the B.N.P. does resort to widespread violence, Prakash said, it will be walking right into a trap. Hasina’s party has been laying the groundwork for an even wider crackdown as it pushes a narrative that the opposition is filled with “terrorists” and “killers.”

Antony Blinken,