Awami League Commands Strong Support Base In Bangladesh: Report | World News

While the interim government led by Muhammad Younis may have downplayed former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s call to boycott the February 2026 elections, the Awami League’s support base tells a different story, according to a report that emerged on Saturday.

He added that even at its worst performance in the 2001 elections (winning 62 out of 300 seats), the Awami League received over 22 million votes, only about a million less than the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which won 193 seats, underlining the Awami League’s enduring popular base.

Writing for leading German media outlet Deutsche Welle (DW), senior journalist and political analyst Masood Kamal observed that despite allegations against its leadership, a large number of Awami League supporters remained “ideologically and historically committed” to the party.

He also argued that “closing a political party by presidential order” is not “a sign of a civilized society.”

“The irony is that this government was designed as a unity government. Instead it has become an instrument of division,” DW quoted Kamal as saying.

The report highlighted that six international human rights groups, including CIVICUS, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Committee for the Promotion of Rights and Human Rights Watch, recently wrote a joint letter to Yunus, calling for the lifting of the ban on the Awami League and warning that such restrictions could harm democratic rights and political justice.

Human rights organizations called on the Interim Government to “avoid political party bans that would undermine the return to genuine multi-party democracy and effectively disenfranchise a large segment of Bangladesh’s electorate.”

The report stated that it is not only the Awami League that faces the threat of exclusion. Since the ouster of the Hasina-led Awami League government, calls to ban the Jatiya Party in Bangladesh have intensified, raising concerns about a broader crackdown on political pluralism.

“The Jatiya Party was excluded from the year-long reform talks of the interim government, although it was not officially banned. The National Citizen Party (NCP), formed by some leaders of the 2024 uprising, made the ban of the Jatiya Party one of its demands,” the DW report said.

Jatiya Party General Secretary Shamim Haider Patwary warned that such a mentality poses a serious risk to the democratic progress of the country.

In an interview with DW, Patwary said, “Excluding the Jatiya Party from all discussions sends a clear message to the administration that there is no need to protect the rights of this party. This will be a fraudulent vote. The Jatiya Party is being treated as an ‘almost banned’ party. This is not a good sign.”