On a day that will be long remembered, Bangladesh’s interim leader, the 85-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, stepped down Monday after handing power to an elected government. In a broadcast to the nation and the world, he said: “Let the practice of democracy, freedom of speech and fundamental rights that has begun not be halted.”

Yunus had returned from self-imposed exile in August 2024, days after the authoritarian government of Sheikh Hasina was overthrown in a student-led “Gen-Z” uprising and she fled by helicopter to India.

Last week, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its leader Tarique Rahman won a commanding electoral victory. Perhaps more significantly — only time will tell — voters in the nation of around 170 million endorsed sweeping democratic reforms in a referendum held the same day.

Hasina’s Awami League, the country’s other major party, was barred from participating. The former prime minister fled after the deadly August 2024 uprising, when security forces killed nearly 800 demonstrators — and possibly as many as 1,400 — during protests that began over high unemployment and a controversial job quota system and swelled into a broader revolt against her rule.

With more than 2,000 candidates from 51 parties and the first genuinely contested parliamentary elections since 2008, Bangladesh can regard the outcome with cautious satisfaction. Although........

© The Japan Times