Though a date has finally been set, a legitimate election is anything but a guarantee. That’s because Bangladesh’s opposition is vowing to boycott the contest if sitting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has governed since 2009 as the head of the left-leaning Awami League, doesn’t step down and appoint an interim government to oversee the vote.

Elections to Watch in 2024: This story is part of a package on 15 key elections this year (besides the United States). Read the full analysis here.

Hasina has served three consecutive five-year terms. The opposition, led by the conservative Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), is concerned the Awami League could rig the Jan. 7 vote to secure Hasina a fourth. Their worry is well-founded: Bangladesh’s most recent general elections, in 2018, saw the Awami League earn 96 percent of the national vote, a result the opposition called “farcical” and that Human Rights Watch warned came with “serious allegations of abuses” including voter intimidation and vote rigging. (The BNP boycotted the election before that, in 2014, for similar reasons.)

In the 2018 election, the Awami League won almost all of the 300 directly elected seats in Bangladesh’s 350-member parliament, while the BNP scored just seven. The 50 remaining seats are allotted to women through a unique quota system. All the seats will be up for grabs again this year. The BNP-led opposition bloc also includes Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and other small parties.

Starting in late 2022, Bangladesh became engulfed in opposition-led protests demanding Hasina’s resignation. The demonstrations have continued—the only difference is that the number of arrests, detentions, injuries, and deaths has risen. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that authorities had arrested nearly 10,000 opposition activists after a canceled October BNP rally; at least 16 had been killed and more than 5,500 injured in ongoing violence.

As FP’s Michael Kugelman, the author of South Asia Brief, underscored in a January 2023 podcast, these protests do not represent a marked new surge in discontent with Hasina or her party. Rather, Kugelman said issues such as spiking inflation and economic insecurity have been “exploited by the opposition” to heighten existing political polarization in an already-divided Bangladesh. “[Y]ou don’t have people across the board coming out into the streets,” he continued. “Those that don’t belong to the opposition either are apathetic or focus on other things …. In many cases, they still see reason to support the government.”

Many of the government’s backers tout its robust economic record. Though the Bangladeshi economy has come under recent difficulty due to the political unrest, larger macroeconomic trends are hard to refute.

Once a deeply impoverished country—derided as a “basket case” by the late U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—“Bangladesh is now a boomtown,” journalist Ahmede Hussain wrote in Foreign Policy in August 2023. It boasts the fastest-growing economy in the Indo-Pacific and is poised to exit the United Nations’ Least Developed Countries list by 2026. Hasina has presided over rapid improvements in human development and the standard of living; the country’s per capita gross domestic product is now higher than those in neighboring India and Pakistan.

But “alongside economic growth has come the crumbling of democracy,” Hussain added in his article last year, as Hasina has ruled with an “iron fist.” Hasina’s chief rival, BNP head—and former prime minister—Khaleda Zia, was jailed in 2018 on corruption charges that most observers consider to be politically motivated. In 2022, then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet warned of “narrowing civic space, increased surveillance, intimidation and reprisals” in Bangladesh and urged the government to investigate allegations of forced disappearances.

The United States has also become more assertive about the situation in Bangladesh. Washington views the nonaligned government in Dhaka, the country’s capital, as an increasingly important player in U.S.-China competition, as well as a partner in containing more local crises such as in Myanmar. In December 2021, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the counterterrorism paramilitary unit of the Bangladesh Police in response to allegations of serious human rights abuse. In May 2023, the U.S. State Department announced a new policy to “restrict the issuance of visas for any Bangladeshi individual, believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh.”

Last October, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, Peter Haas, sought to compel the Awami League and opposition to engage in dialogue—a prospect Hasina rejected. “Any action that undermines the democratic elections process—including violence, preventing people from exercising their right to peaceful assembly, and internet access—calls into question the ability to conduct free and fair elections,” Haas said, as reported in Benar News. In the months following, Haas faced repeated death threats from members of the Awami League.

For the Jan. 7 elections to have any hope of being free and fair, Hasina would—however improbably—have to step down to thwart the opposition’s threatened boycott. This is unlikely, as neither the Awami League nor the BNP have clear programs beyond their respective cults of personality. Hasina and Zia hail from families that have ruled Bangladesh since it gained independence from Pakistan 51 years ago and are effectively “dynastic matriarchs,” Charlie Campbell wrote in a recent Time profile of Hasina.

The big question is “what happens after the election,” as “unrest and violence are possible” if broad swaths of the population consider the vote to be illegitimate, Kugelman wrote in an email. Though the Awami League and BNP seem uninterested in exploring new leadership and finding a way out of the present impasse, Hasina and Zia—76 and 78 years old, respectively—cannot remain on the political scene forever. Whenever Bangladesh moves on to new leadership, the country will be in uncharted territory.