“We dreamt of a country where all people, regardless of gender, race, religion, would have equal opportunity… We expected policy changes and reforms, but it is far away from what we dreamt of.” A 25-year-old student who participated in the 2024 mass uprising said these words to Reuters late last month while commenting on the February 12 election, in which he and his peers are expected to vote. These are not words of withdrawal or even of anger. The mood is rather one of subdued disappointment or cautious realism.
This election will not be a test of whether young Bangladeshis care about politics. They do. On the streets, in classrooms, online, and often at considerable personal cost. What this election will test is something more difficult: whether the political system has found a way to accommodate them.
Nearly 44 percent of Bangladesh’s electoral roll—more than five crore voters—are between the ages of 18 and 37. It is the largest youth electorate the country has ever seen, a fact that is often presented as evidence of Bangladesh’s democratic vitality. But numbers alone do not confer democratic legitimacy. Political systems do not fail when citizens stay away; they fail when citizens arrive in large numbers and still feel politically unmoored.
This is the paradox shaping the current moment. Youth turnout is expected to be significantly high, with some estimates even putting it above 90 percent. And yet, enthusiasm about the political choices on offer remains strikingly thin. Many young voters who demanded a “new Bangladesh” after 2024 now describe being pushed back toward familiar parties by default rather than choice. Others hover in a space of uncertainty, participating without a real sense of ownership, voting without conviction.
Political legitimacy rests on more than procedure. As German philosopher Jürgen Habermas warned, systems can work on paper and still fail if they cease to be responsive. British social theorist David Beetham made a similar point: consent must be justified, not assumed. In Bangladesh, young people are participating, but many do not feel their political language—of opportunity, quality, dignity, fairness—has been absorbed into how politics operates. While participation grows, integration of youth voices lags. Voting shifts from ownership to a tick-box exercise, and verdict becomes fragile.
This fragility did not emerge overnight. The 2024 uprising represented a rupture in political order, but not a redesign of political pathways. Protests disrupted power. Institutions under the interim regime responded by restoring routine to some extent. Elections were scheduled, procedures resumed. In doing so, the system demonstrated a capacity for survival, but not for learning.
This is not a failure of youth mobilisation. Movements are rarely designed to build parties. They surface to express grievances and force visibility. The deeper failure lies in the political field itself: its narrow leadership pipelines, its closed organisational cultures, its inability to translate mobilisation into durable institutional change.
US political theorist Iris Marion Young warned against precisely this form of exclusion: systems that include citizens numerically while excluding them structurally. Representation, she argued, is not simply about counting voices but about whether social perspectives are incorporated into decision-making processes. By that measure, many young Bangladeshis are present but unheard. They are inside the system, yet lingering at the margins.
This is evident in how different actors speak about the election. The old guards and institutions tend to frame the moment in the language of order, stability, legitimacy, and reform that is suspended somewhere in the future. Youth speak instead about employment, equity, and change more in the present. They are not arguing about the same things. They are speaking different political languages.
An editorial in The Daily Star captured this misalignment very precisely: “The old way of doing electoral politics—simply dumping empty promises into manifestos—is unlikely to work with this increasingly vocal voter population.” The observation is understated but consequential: traditional electoral rituals no longer command automatic credibility.
Youth voices are explicit about the distance they feel. Voters who wanted a “New Bangladesh” free from the baggage of the past now feel they are being forced to choose between the old guard and alliances, which does not reflect their aspirations, said a 23-year-old archaeology student interviewed by Reuters. Another, reflecting on the aftermath of 2024, put it more starkly: “After a year, I feel the spirit of the July revolution is completely lost. Violence has increased... and the interim government is not taking steps that make us feel secure.”
These are not radical demands or calls for ideological reinvention. They are pleas for institutional seriousness, for politics that takes lived experience as a starting point rather than an inconvenience.
In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, the Jamaat-e-Islami Ameer cited that the youth have already “given their verdict in favour of Islami Chhatrashibir,” pointing to student union victories in five universities. The implication is troubling. Campus elections and national elections do not operate in the same political register; one reflects organisational strength within bounded institutional settings, the other mediates national power and plural interests.
To collapse the two is to revert to a monologic understanding of politics that reads participation as closure rather than process. Youth aspiration is declared resolved before it has been negotiated. This closed reading is not only analytically premature; it is democratically risky.
Generational differences complicate this further. Many millennials learned politics through endurance: compromise, adjustment, survival within imperfect systems. Gen-Z learned politics through rupture: visibility, collective action, and moral clarity. One seeks entry; the other seeks redesign. The tension between these orientations explains why some young voters settle, others resist, and many hesitate.
This is not an unfamiliar challenge. Other large, power-holding institutions have confronted similar generational tensions without mistaking participation for satisfaction. In many multinational corporations, differences between millennials and Gen-Z are treated less as attitude problems and more as questions of organisational design. Cultures are recalibrated, feedback loops are redesigned, and strategies are revisited when engagement falters. The point is not that politics should borrow corporate models, but that systems capable of learning respond to misalignment by altering their architecture, not by celebrating participation while deferring change.
What makes this election pivotal is not merely that youth votes could swing outcomes. It is that youth participation has raised the moral stakes of democratic performance. High turnout combined with low integration produces a volatile form of legitimacy, one that can unravel quickly if post-election governance fails to respond substantively and quickly.
This is where democratic theory becomes uncomfortably practical. Legitimacy, as Habermas reminded us, cannot be banked indefinitely. It must be reproduced through responsiveness. Elections can restore order. They cannot restore trust on their own.
The ballots will be counted. A new government will be formed. Stability may well be achieved. The unresolved question is whether the expectations carried into polling stations by millions of young voters will be absorbed into how power is exercised, or whether those will once again be deferred, managed, and normalised away.
Tasneem Tayeb is a columnist for The Daily Star. Her X handle is @tasneem_tayeb.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries, and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.
