Jamaat to Go Solo in Local Election
Jamaat will skip alliance deals and run alone in Bangladesh's local elections. The move is already straining ties with NCP and other allies over key mayoral seats.
In a Nutshell
- Jamaat-e-Islami will contest the upcoming local elections alone, not through seat-sharing with allies.
- Jamaat says local polls have no party symbols, so joint contests are too complicated to organise.
- In Dhaka South, Jamaat picked Shadik Kayem for mayor while NCP wants its own leader, Asif Mahmud Sajeeb Bhuiyan, for the same seat.
- Khelafat Majlis already left the 11-party alliance in July, and may team up with Hefazat-e-Islam instead.
- The government plans local elections by late 2026, with Tk6,000 crore already set aside.
Context
Jamaat and NCP formed an 11-party alliance in January 2026 before winning 77 seats together in the February general election, which BNP won overall with a two-thirds majority. Critics called the Jamaat-NCP pairing odd from the start. An old religious party joined with a group born from the 2024 student uprising. Fourteen senior NCP leaders quit right after the alliance was announced. Now, with no national vote to force cooperation, cracks are showing again.
Why It Matters
This split matters most for what it hands to BNP, the ruling party since February 2026. BNP is already treating local elections as an organisational test, with Chairman Tarique Rahman holding grassroots meetings to lock down single, party-backed candidates in every union and ward and avoid vote-splitting. A united Jamaat-NCP front, or even an informal seat-sharing deal, would have created a consolidated opposition bloc capable of contesting BNP strongholds with combined organisational weight. Instead, Jamaat's solo run and the resulting friction within the NCP fragment the anti-BNP vote before campaigning even begins, particularly in symbolic races like the Dhaka South and Dhaka North mayoral contests.
What Jamaat Is Saying
At an Election Commission briefing, Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh General Secretary Mia Golam Porwar outlined nine demands, including restoring candidacy rights for MPO-listed teachers, barring banned-party figures and party-linked administrators from contesting, removing a BNP-tied EC official, and banning ministers and MPs from campaigning. He said some demands have already been accepted, others remain pending, and while the EC cited “helplessness” on matters requiring government action, Jamaat is not currently considering a boycott but will keep pressing its case.
Porwar also confirmed the 11-party alliance was formed strictly for the national election, with no decision covering local polls at any tier. Each party, including Jamaat, is free to field its own candidates running “individually,” meaning clashes between allied candidates are expected and permitted.
What we think
Jamaat's official "grassroots test" framing sits alongside a more practical reality: it holds the stronger organisational hand in this alliance, and going solo lets it claim full credit rather than splitting seats with a weaker partner. This fracture arrives just as BNP is consolidating single-candidate seats across the board, and a divided opposition benefits an already dominant ruling party by default.
The Khelafat Majlis-Hefazat realignment suggests the opposition is scattering into narrower factions rather than building a coherent alternative. For citizens hoping the post-uprising era would bring genuine political renewal, this fragmentation weakens the prospects for a unified counterweight to the BNP's dominance.