The ghosts of the old guard won’t be on the ballot in Dhaka this week, but they are haunting every corner of the campaign trail. When Bangladeshis head to the polls on February 12, they are performing a high-stakes autopsy on a collapsed autocracy and attempting to breathe life into a republic that is nearly flatlined.

This is the first electoral test since the seismic uprising of 2024, a year defined by the blood of student protesters and the ignominious flight of an ousted prime minister. It is a moment of profound, terrifying reckoning.

For the first time in nearly two decades, the Awami League—the juggernaut that Sheikh Hasina steered with an increasingly iron fist—is nowhere to be found. The party that boasted of historic GDP growth while systematically dismantling the machinery of dissent has been effectively scrubbed from the political map, its leaders either in exile, behind bars, or barred from the contest.

In the wake of Hasina’s departure, a vacuum has opened, and the scramble to fill it is proving that the end of a dictatorship is often just the beginning of a different kind of chaos. Seizing the momentum is the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), a party almost risen from the ashes of years of systematic suppression.

For a decade, the BNP was a hollowed-out shell, its leadership decimated by arrests and its relevance stifled by boycotted elections. But the return of acting chairman Tarique Rahman from 17 years of exile has acted like a shot of adrenaline to the party’s heart.

His homecoming was a mobilization masterclass that consolidated the party’s fractured base and signaled to the establishment that the old lineage was back to claim its inheritance. The BNP’s pitch is a masterclass in survivalist pragmatism, pivoting away from the lofty ideological battles of the past to focus on the empty stomachs of the present.

With “Family Cards” and “Farmer Cards,” the party is betting that a population ravaged by inflation and post-revolutionary instability wants subsidized grain and cash more than it wants grand manifestos.

They are promising a return to “normalcy”—a balanced foreign policy and a state that serves the citizen, even as they struggle to maintain discipline among a stable of rebel candidates who threaten to derail the party’s official slate from within.

However, the BNP’s coronation is far from guaranteed, largely because of a quiet, disciplined surge from the religious right. Jamaat-e-Islami, once a political pariah relegated to the fringes due to its dark history during the 1971 liberation war, has pulled off a rebranding effort that should terrify secularists.

By positioning itself as the only “clean” alternative to the dynastic bickering and endemic corruption of both the Awami League and the BNP, Jamaat is successfully courting a new generation. They aren’t just preaching; they are organizing, offering a potent cocktail of moral governance and social justice wrapped in the flag of Islamic values.

In the former strongholds of the Awami League, where voters feel abandoned and cynical, Jamaat’s message of disciplined, graft-free administration is finding a receptive audience. This rightward drift, however, is a fundamental realignment that threatens to shrink the space for pluralism and civil liberties in a post-Hasina Bangladesh, leaving secular activists wondering if they have traded one form of intolerance for another.

The true wild card, however, is the youth. A staggering third of the electorate is under 35, a demographic that views the political establishment with profound suspicion. These are the voters who stood in front of armored vehicles in 2024, and they have little patience for the “business as usual” politics of the BNP or the moralizing of Jamaat.

While new movements like the National Citizen Party (NCP) may lack the deep-pocketed machinery of the legacy parties, they represent a permanent shift in the political landscape. Their alliance with the Jamaat now is a game changer as  power is no longer exclusively brokered in backrooms or through dynastic succession; it is being negotiated on social media and through decentralized grassroots networks.

Yet, the specter of violence looms over this fragile democratic experiment. The campaign has already been marred by targeted killings and street-level thuggery, reminding the world that in Bangladesh, the transition from the street to the ballot box is often paved with broken glass.

Without the Awami League’s participation, probably a significant portion of the population remains unrepresented, raising the chilling prospect that this election, instead of providing a sense of closure, will seed the ground for the next cycle of grievance and retribution.

The world is watching, and the neighborhood is nervous. New Delhi, which spent years tethered to Hasina’s stability, is now forced into a panicked recalibration, while Beijing and Islamabad look for openings in the new disorder.

But for the person in the Dhaka voting booth, the geopolitics are secondary to a much more intimate question: Can a country move past its trauma to build something that lasts?

On February 12, Bangladesh will decide if it is ready to trade the charismatic authority of strongmen for the boring, difficult work of institutional reform. It is a choice between the comfort of old ideologies and the risky, unproven hope of a fresh start.

If they fail to get it right, the “Second Independence” of 2024 may end up being remembered less as a liberation, and more as a brief intermission between tragedies.

Faisal Mahmud is a journalist currently on sabbatical, serving as Minister (Press) at the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi.