Bangladesh elects new president Mirza Fakhrul
Md Jahidul Islam
Dhaka: After 35 years, Bangladesh has elected a new president via a direct voting system. The ruling political party, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), nominated candidate Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir elected the country’s 23rd president.
Previously, the last contested presidential election was held on 8 October 1991. Since then, no vote was required in 1996, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2013, 2018 or 2023, as each election had only one candidate.
In the presidential voting system, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir bagged 255 votes, defeating his opponent candidate Col (retd) Oli Ahmad (who was the 11-party alliance-nominated candidate), who secured 88 votes.
Bangladesh government’s Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and the election returning officer AMM Nasir Uddin announced the results after the balloting in the much-anticipated presidential election ended at 5 pm on Thursday at the National Parliament Building (Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban).
After completing the announcement, the Election Commission has published a gazette declaring Fakhrul Islam as the president of Bangladesh. The gazette was signed by the Election Commission’s Senior Secretary Akhtar Ahmed. The gazette notification said the election officer announced Mirza Fakhrul as the new president under Clause-12 of the Presidential Election Act, 1991.
Last February held a national parliament election where the BNP held a two-thirds majority; Mirza Fakhrul is widely expected to win. However, the main focus of political interest is on the vote tally of the two candidates.
The ruling-party Chief Whip Nurul Islam Moni said that the winner (Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir) will take the oath as president at Bangabhaban at 7:30 pm on Friday.
The veteran politician Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir was born in 1948 in the country’s northwestern corner district of Thakurgaon, within the Rangpur Division, into a political family. A former leftist, Mirza Fakhrul studied economics at Dhaka University and joined the East Pakistan Students Union and led its university unit during the 1969 mass uprising.
After completing his graduation in 1972, Mirza Fakhrul became a teacher of economics at Dhaka College. Among other government responsibilities, at that time Fakhrul served in the administration of former President Ziaur Rahman.
Fakhrul taught economics at Thakurgaon Govt College and also worked for the Bangladesh government’s Directorate of Inspection and Audit as an auditor and for UNESCO until 1986.
Ahead of the 1986 municipal polls, Fakhrul resigned from his government post. He was elected as the Thakurgaon municipality chairman in the 1988 municipal elections as an independent candidate.
Fakhrul taught economics, worked in government service, and entered local politics before joining the BNP around the anti-Ershad movement in 1990. Elected to parliament in 2001, Fakhrul was appointed as a Minister of State in charge of the Ministry of Agriculture. After the cabinet reshuffle named Minister of State in charge of the Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism, where he served until October 2006.
His deeper political formation came in opposition; he became acting BNP secretary-general in 2011 and formally assumed the post in 2016. Much of that period was spent not distributing patronage but enduring arrests, court appearances, street agitation and prison as the party was systematically pushed from public life under Sheikh Hasina.
He describes himself as a liberal democrat and retains traces of his leftist youth, an attachment to pluralism, cultural openness and suspicion of religious majoritarianism. He has consistently defended the centrality of the 1971 Liberation War, even when it irritated newer anti-Awami League constituencies, while remaining pragmatic; during the 2026 campaign he avoided the language of secularism, speaking instead of equal rights for all religions.
Fakhrul has lived through 1969, the Liberation War, military rule, democratic restoration, authoritarian regression and the uprising that removed Sheikh Hasina. Previously, Fakhrul belonged to several Bangladeshi political eras. His restraint and activities, without being partisan, biased, or dogmatic, have become his main characteristic, yet ideological.
