After the revolution, Bangladesh's youth face democracy’s hardest test

In July 2024, young Bangladeshis achieved a remarkable milestone. Armed with smartphones and raw courage, they flooded the streets demanding quota reform, faced down security forces that killed over a thousand protesters according to human rights groups, and within weeks toppled Sheikh Hasina's 15-year government. 

Western observers had long characterised her rule as Bangladesh drifting toward one-party statehood. The students proved that drift could be reversed.

Now comes the harder part. When Bangladeshis head to the polls on February 12, these same young people will face a different kind of test, one that requires patience rather than passion, compromise rather than confrontation. 

The question is no longer whether Bangladesh's youth can tear down an entrenched regime. They already answered that. The question is whether they can build democratic institutions capable of surviving the next government.

The demographic stakes are unprecedented. According to the Bangladesh Election Commission's November 2025 voter roll, the electorate now stands at 127.7 million, an increase of eight million since the sham election of January 2024 that both Washington and London refused to recognise as legitimate. 

International observers had noted that opposition candidates were systematically harassed, arrested on fabricated charges, or prevented from campaigning. 

On election day itself, reports emerged of stuffed ballot boxes, captured polling stations, and voter intimidation by ruling party activists. Turnout was officially reported at 40 percent, but independent monitoring suggested far lower participation, with many polling centers sitting nearly empty. 

The result was foreordained: Sheikh Hasina secured another term through an electoral process that bore all the hallmarks of authoritarian theatre rather than democratic choice.

Today, approximately 56 million of Bangladesh’s voters are aged 18-37, constituting 44 percent of the total electorate. Among them are an estimated 12.5 million first-time voters who have never cast a meaningful ballot.

For context, this youth bloc alone exceeds the entire population of South Korea. It is larger than the combined electorates of several European Union member states. 

Unlike their parents and grandparents, who watched helplessly as elections became theatrical exercises with predetermined outcomes, these young voters believe they have demonstrated that their actions can reshape political reality.

The promise is legitimate democratic renewal. Eight political parties, cutting across ideological lines, have organised mass demonstrations demanding electoral system reform before any vote takes place. 

Following Sheikh Hasina's resignation and flight away to India on August 5, 2024, student protest leaders proposed Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus to head an interim government, a choice endorsed by students, President Mohammed Shahabuddin and Bangladesh's military leadership. 

Yunus was sworn in on August 8, 2024, as Chief Adviser to lead what is technically an extra-constitutional government, though Bangladesh's Supreme Court affirmed its legitimacy under the doctrine of necessity, recognising that Hasina's abrupt departure created a constitutional vacuum with no remedy under existing law. 

The interim government led by Yunus introduced postal voting for expatriates. These are not cosmetic changes. They represent the institutional foundations that Bangladesh's democracy has long lacked.

Revolution meets electoral reality

The peril is that revolutionary energy rarely translates smoothly into electoral success. The urban youth who drove the July uprising are more educated, more digitally connected, and more globally aware, and represent a minority of Bangladesh's population. 

Data from the 2022 census by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics reveals that 68.5 percent of the country's 165 million people live in rural areas, where internet penetration stands at just 31 per cent, compared with 49 per cent in cities. 

The protests were coordinated through social media chains. Rural Bangladesh, where elections are ultimately decided, operates on different networks, familial, patronage-based, and deeply suspicious of Dhaka's cosmopolitan revolutionaries.

The urban-rural divide creates concrete electoral challenges that could undermine democratic consolidation. Compounding these difficulties, young activists navigating the electoral landscape face a volatile security environment. 

The fragmentation of youth-backed political forces compounds the problem. The National Citizen Party, born from the July uprising, has allied with Jamaat-e-Islami, while other student leaders remain independent or have joined established parties, diluting what could have been a unified generational bloc.

This urban-rural divide maps onto an economic grievance that international investors would be well advised to understand. Bangladesh's headline youth unemployment rate of 4.5 percent dramatically understates the problem. 

According to the Bureau of Statistics, 87 percent of the country's unemployed are educated, and 21 per cent hold university degrees. 

These are not unskilled workers priced out of the labour market. They are graduates who did everything their society asked of them, studied hard, passed examinations, earned credentials, only to discover that jobs go to those with political connections rather than qualifications.

The quota system that sparked the July protests was merely the most visible symptom of this deeper dysfunction. 

Young Bangladeshis understood that the system was designed to exclude them. Their rage was not ideological. It was existential. A 2024 study by the British Council found that 55 percent of Bangladeshi youth wished to leave the country entirely due to limited economic prospects. 

When more than half of a nation's young people aspire to emigrate, the social contract has collapsed.

Many young people from families that traditionally supported the Awami League have shifted toward Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh's largest Islamist party, a development that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. 

Interpretation points to the same conclusion: young Bangladeshis are not inheriting their parents' political loyalties. They are making independent calculations based on their own experiences and interests. This ideological fluidity makes them simultaneously the most valuable and most unpredictable constituency in South Asian politics.

International stakeholders – governments, multilateral institutions, and the businesses that depend on Bangladesh's $475bn economy and its position as the world's second-largest garment exporter – should pay close attention to how this agility resolves itself.

A credible election that channels youth energy into legitimate political participation could stabilise a country that has experienced significant upheaval. 

A contested result that young voters perceive as stolen could trigger renewed unrest from a generation that has already demonstrated its willingness to sacrifice for democratic principles.

The regional implications extend beyond Bangladesh's borders. 

India, which shares a 4,000-kilometre boundary with its eastern neighbour, has watched nervously as its preferred partner was ousted by street protests. 

China, which invested heavily in infrastructure projects under the previous government, faces uncertainty about whether those commitments will be honoured. The garment industry that supplies Western retailers depends on political stability that cannot be taken for granted.

Yet the most significant implications may be ideational rather than geopolitical. Across South and Southeast Asia, young populations are growing increasingly frustrated with democratic systems that seem to offer participation without power, elections without choice, and credentials without opportunity.

Bangladesh's July uprising demonstrated that this frustration can topple governments. This election will demonstrate whether it can build something better.

The road ahead

The revolutionaries of 2024 succeeded because they were willing to absorb tremendous costs, imprisonment, injury, and death, only for principles their elders had abandoned as naive. 

They rejected the counsel of pragmatists who urged patience with a system that had no intention of reforming itself. They proved that collective action by ordinary citizens could overcome entrenched power backed by state violence.

On December 18, tens of thousands of young Bangladeshis poured into the streets of Dhaka, their voices hoarse from chanting a single name: Sharif Osman Hadi. 

The 32-year-old teacher, writer, and revolutionary spokesperson had succumbed to a gunshot to the head inflicted by masked assassins nearly a week earlier. Yet as his body was lowered into the earth, something remarkable crystallised. This was not merely a funeral; it was the moment Bangladesh's revolution became irrevocable.

Every revolution has an inflection point at which collective aspiration transforms into an inviolable covenant. For Bangladesh, that moment has a name. Hadi’s assassination transformed the July 2024 uprising from a successful protest into a moral reckoning.

These are not lessons that can be unlearned. The 56 million young Bangladeshis who will vote have seen what is possible when a generation refuses to accept the unacceptable. They have watched friends die for the right to cast meaningful ballots. They will not easily forgive any party or institution that attempts to render those sacrifices meaningless.

The international community spent years expressing concern about Bangladesh's democratic backsliding while continuing business as usual with its government. That approach failed. It failed the Bangladeshi people, who deserved better, and it failed Western interests that now face greater uncertainty than necessary.

The coming months offer an opportunity to do better; to support electoral processes that meet international standards, to hold all parties accountable for respecting the results, and to recognise that Bangladesh's young democrats have earned the right to determine their own future.