In Bangladesh’s political landscape, the July Revolution of 2024 marked a rare rupture. What initiated as a student-driven revolt against fascism swiftly expanded into a wider civic awakening.
In the moment of political vacuum, the National Citizen’s Party (NCP) emerged as a symbolic vessel for generational hope.
The party’s initial acceptance among the people was emotional, not purely electoral. For Gen-Z and first-time voters, the NCP appeared as an alternative that will help to escape from the rooted duopoly of the Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
However, the underlying settings that sponsored the NCP’s birth also sowed the seeds of its fragility. Momentum is generated by revolutions, but organization is required for election.
Therefore, the NCP confronted a dilemma, when the state moved from street politics to electoral politics. This dilemma haunted the NCP as it failed to convert emotional support to political strength.
Soon after the revolution, the party started to fear facing an election.
After the revolution, Bangladesh was expected to enter into a new political moment. The birth of the NCP reflected a change driven by Gen Z, who demanded a break from traditional political customs.
The emergence of NCP is also rooted in a common public sentiment. It is a belief among the people that political parties must serve citizens rather than gaining power.
The party also represented a long-waited reset in BD politics by concentrating on decentralization, citizen-driven governance, and participatory politics.
Such visions generated a sense of restored prospects in the political landscape.
However, considering the 13th parliamentary election, NCP decided to ally with the Jamat-e-Islam, an Islamist party with a long and controversial history.
This decision of the coalition exposes a contradiction between the reformist image and the strategic calculation. This alignment has alienated the party from its goal and raised public concern about ideological inconsistency.
The scenes are also intensified by the recent resignation of the party’s well-known figures including Dr Tasnim Zara, Dr Tajnuva Jabeen, and Mahfuz Alam.
Such departures did not purely happen in isolation and reflected an increasing unease among the followers as well as voters who expected a politics of principle.
Instead, the recurrent pattern of political alliances and compromises is what has become visible.
In Bangladesh, coalition politics has become a recurrent pattern that is interlaced into the country’s political landscape. At the time of election, coalitions among political parties reemerge, break, and reconfigure.
The roots of coalition politics in Bangladesh go back to the early 1990s when the country moved to parliamentary democracy from military rule. Yet, the transition could not develop a stable party system.
That time, no single party could prevail with ease without building coalitions due to the highly competitive political ground. The Awami League-led Grand Alliance and the BNP-led Four-Party Alliance became the two major axes of national politics.
Yet, the dominant electoral success failed to emancipate them from relying on these uncomfortable associations, as it continued to serve as a tool to suppress internal dissent.
Thus, alliances became an instrument for achieving legitimacy.
Most strikingly, it has been utilized as a strategic weapon to absorb the emerging political leaders into an already fragmented political arena.
In addition, the alliance of Gono Odhikar Parishad (GOP) with the BNP exemplifies coalition as a habitual feature in BD politics. The former general secretary of GOP Md Rashed Khan has joined BNP and according to him, it is a shift his previous party endorsed as a deliberate bid for votes.
Thus, the cycles of alliances have become predictable in the country’s political arena as the parties keep returning to coalitions out of electoral fear and reinforces the habitual preferences of political parties -- electoral gains over ideologies.
In these fractured political settings, can genuine political stability and true democracy ever be attained?
The visible crisis within the emerging political parties emphasizes a profound concern for the country’s political trajectories.
Due to the instability in ideological foundations, even the most promising political ideas can eventually fall back into the same old cycle of coalitions.
Therefore, the political leaders of this country must realize that relying on coalitions to ensure parliament seats is a momentary fix which could undermine the long-term aims of the new political parties.
Real political changes require ideological coherence and robust political commitment.
Md Limon Bhuiyan is a graduate student at the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at Texas Tech University, Texas, USA.
