Six seats, big goals: What’s next for Bangladesh’s student-led NCP party? 

Dhaka, Bangladesh – Ruhul Amin had long been disillusioned with Bangladesh’s established political parties and had waited for a credible third force.

When student leaders behind a 2024 uprising – which ousted longtime leader Sheikh Hasina – formed the National Citizen Party (NCP), Amin, who is in his early 30s, felt he had finally found a party he could vote for – and call his own.

The NCP was formally launched in February 2025. Its leaders claimed broad public backing and strong electoral prospects, even hinting at forming a future government.

But reality soon set in. Despite the momentum and widespread support the student leaders enjoyed during the uprising, the NCP could not organise itself into a grassroots organisation capable enough for an electoral race to the parliament on its own. Opinion polls in the lead-up to the February 12 election suggested the party’s support hovered in low single digits.

Eventually, the NCP struck a deal with the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party as a junior coalition partner, contesting just 30 of the 300 parliamentary seats and winning six. A coalition led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) swept the polls, winning a landslide 212 seats, while the Jamaat-led alliance secured 77.

But the victory of an established party has not dented Amin’s spirits.

“We did well this election as a new party,” he told Al Jazeera from the Kushtia district in western Bangladesh. “We have only begun. In the next few election cycles, the NCP will emerge as the new big thing.”

From uprising to parliament

Several NCP leaders, who rose to prominence during the 2024 uprising, are now members of parliament.

For their supporters, six seats represent an unlikely breakthrough for a nascent political party. For critics, however, the party’s performance underscores the structural limits of a protest movement transitioning into formal politics.

NCP spokesman Asif Mahmud, who headed the party’s election steering committee, described the poll outcome as encouraging.

“For a party that is only 11 months old, it was a very good performance,” he told Al Jazeera. “Of course, it could have been better. We expected more. But considering the circumstances, we are happy.”

Mahmud argued that the NCP may have lost two or three additional seats by narrow margins due to alleged vote-counting irregularities. When pressed about evidence, he said the party had already registered its concerns during the election process.

Still, he acknowledged that entering the electoral race required compromise. Initially, he said, the NCP had preferred to contest independently. “But given the political structure, to ensure representation and survival, we had to enter into an alliance,” he said.

That alliance – with the Jamaat – has become the defining tension of the NCP’s post-election future.

Alliance politics and internal fractures

The Jamaat, Bangladesh’s largest religion-based party, has historically advocated for Islamic law and held conservative positions on women’s rights. Despite the party’s more recent commitments to stick to the country’s inclusive, secular constitution – it even had a Hindu candidate in the elections for the first time – the decision to ally with the Jamaat triggered internal rifts within the NCP.

More than a dozen senior party leaders resigned within a week of the announcement of the alliance because they felt that a coalition with the Jamaat was fundamentally incompatible with the NCP’s ideology as well as the inclusive values that shaped the 2024 uprising. They feared the alliance would undermine the party’s credibility and its centrist base.

But Mahmud rejected such fears. “We are not doing shadow politics,” he told Al Jazeera. “If you observe our statements, they are not identical to Jamaat’s.”

Mahmud stressed that the arrangement with the Jamaat was an electoral alliance, “not a political merger”.

For now, the NCP says it is preparing to contest upcoming local government elections independently, though the leadership has not entirely ruled out another arrangement with Jamaat.

SM Suza Uddin, an NCP leader who contested the February 12 election from Bandarban, a border district with Myanmar, and lost, told Al Jazeera the party had “limited alternatives” at the time and described the alliance with the Jamaat as political pragmatism.

He claimed the NCP was a “generational corrective” to what he called a wider leadership crisis across all political parties. “Young politicians in many parties feel frustrated. People are hungry for change. Everywhere we went, we saw that desire,” he said.

“NCP is the hope, NCP is the alternative,” he added, arguing that having six parliamentarians provides the institutional experience to build upon.

But not everyone is convinced.

Anik Roy, a former NCP leader who resigned last year – before the Jamaat alliance was announced – believes the alliance has structurally tethered the party to the Jamaat.

“I don’t see any practical way for NCP to leave Jamaat now,” he said, noting that the role of the opposition parties inside parliament is already organised along alliance lines.

“The real test will be the local government elections,” Roy added. “If they again align with Jamaat, that will show their direction.”

He also questioned the party’s ideological clarity. “If they claim to be centrist, what does that mean? Centre-right or centre-left?” he asked. “In Bangladesh, those distinctions matter. But NCP has not yet clarified its values.”

Without the Jamaat’s backing, Roy argued, the party would likely have won no seats at all. “The foundation is fragile,” he told Al Jazeera. “They [NCP] risk becoming a proxy that strengthens Jamaat.”

Spokesman Mahmud disputes the notion that the party’s grassroots base is weak. “There is a tendency to assume that the BNP comes first in grassroots organisation, followed by Jamaat and then comes the NCP,” he said. “But the reality varies district by district.”

In some constituencies, he argued, NCP candidates outperformed expectations by focusing on local issues. He pointed to seats where long-term community engagement, rather than traditional patronage networks, delivered victories – even against the efforts of major parties.

“This is the model we want to expand,” he said.

Can a third force take root?

Much of the NCP’s political capital stems from the 2024 uprising – the student-led movement that briefly united diverse opposition forces. At that time, leaders like Nahid Islam and Mahmud enjoyed broad cross-party appeal. Islam, one of the most prominent faces of the July 2024 uprising, is now the NCP’s convener. He has been elected as a member of parliament from a Dhaka constituency and currently serves as the chief whip of the opposition alliance.

“Comparing the uprising period with party politics is not fair,” said Mahmud. “Once you enter partisan politics, clashes are inevitable.”

He noted that during the antigovernment protests in 2024, figures from BNP, Jamaat and other parties were part of a broader movement aimed at restoring democracy in Bangladesh. But after forming a party, the NCP turned into a political competitor – and therefore a target.

Asif Bin Ali, a geopolitical analyst and doctoral fellow at Georgia State University in the United States, sees that transition as decisive.

“In practice, the NCP has shown very little interest in becoming an autonomous third force,” he told Al Jazeera. “Since the election, it has not articulated any agenda distinct from Jamaat-e-Islami and seems quite comfortable operating under Jamaat’s umbrella.”

In his view, the party’s tactics increasingly resemble those of the established actors. “It is a traditional party with younger faces,” he said.

Political scientist Abdul Latif Masum, a retired professor of government and politics at Jahangirnagar University, believes the window for the NCP’s independent growth is narrow, although he called the party’s entry to parliament “a positive beginning”.

“The possibility of NCP developing into a strong, independent third force is limited,” he said, citing organisational weakness and internal divisions.

Still, he acknowledged that the emotional legitimacy of the 2024 upheaval has not entirely faded. If the party can consolidate and clarify its direction, “there remains some potential”.

For now, experts believe the NCP occupies an ambiguous space. It is formally present in parliament, symbolically tied to a historic mass uprising, and yet navigating alliances within a deeply polarised political system.

Spokesman Mahmud insists the party’s leadership should be judged by the work it does. The landmark February 12 election, he said, was a test – and the NCP has now “officially appeared as Bangladesh’s third force”.

But whether six seats translate into a third force will depend on what happens next, analysts say. Can the party expand beyond alliance politics, build deeper grassroots networks, and articulate a clearer ideological coherence?

Amin remains hopeful. For him, having six seats in parliament is not an endpoint, but proof that a student-led experiment can survive in Bangladesh’s hard-edged political terrain.

“We started on the streets. Now we are in parliament. We are not going back,” he said.