Why AL won

THE Awami League has won the National Election 2008 by a stunning landslide for many solid reasons including some indefensible faults of its opponent. In a pre-election analysis, Jyoti Rahman and I identified five decisive factors which were likely to determine the results of this election.
In the absence of a credible exit-poll, this article revaluates those determinants and correlates them with the final election results to see exactly what happened on December 29, 2008.
These are the five reasons, all of them reinforcing, which together created the conducive environment for AL's massive win.

Anti-incumbency
In western democracies, election result always goes against the incumbent when 50 percent of the voters think that the country is not on the right trajectory. Evidently, Bangladesh is no different either.
As we mentioned in the pre-election analysis, 50 seats won by the BNP in 1991 went to AL in 1996, and 89 seats won by AL in 1996 went to BNP in 2001, showing a strong anti-incumbency trend in these constituencies.
We predicted that the party better situated to portray itself as the most anti-incumbent will gain these swing seats. The BNP leadership tried their best to portray themselves as the main opposition by fiercely criticising the caretaker government during the election campaign. Ironically, it rather backfired for them for a couple of reasons.
According to the Daily Star-Nielsen pre-election survey, 41 per cent of respondents thought that the major issues for the new government would be the price inflation, whereas another 14 percent though it would be corruption. This means that these are the same two issues that influenced the voters when the cast their ballot. To elect the best party to handle these two issues, the voters definitely judged each party's respective performance in previous terms.
First, it was hard for the voters to distinguish BNP and the caretaker government on issues of commodity price and energy crisis. Both management failure and global price hike haunted the two regimes, whereas AL showed a remarkable success during its tenure by keeping the inflation rate under control and adding substantive new electricity to the national grid. Hence, criticism against the caretaker government for price and energy by default went against BNP, too, and AL won the anti-incumbency vote.
Second, the criticism against CTG's anti-corruption drive could not be materialised either. While there were many valid allegations against the process of CTG's anti-corruption drive, the voters were able to separate that from their own observation and assessment of the BNP's unprecedented corruption.

For the full version of this article please read this month's Forum, available free with The Daily Star on Monday, January 12.

Syeed Ahamed is a public policy analyst.