Today's Edition
Dhaka (AFP)
Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has won a fifth term in power with her party taking three-quarters of seats in parliament, election officials said on Monday.
Hasina has presided over breakneck economic growth in a country once beset by grinding poverty.
"The Awami League has won the election," Moniruzzaman Talukder, joint secretary of the Election Commission, said a day after a vote that initial reports suggested drew a turnout of around 40 percent.
Talukder said Hasina's party had won 223 seats. But the support of other lawmakers, including from allied parties, means her actual control over the 300-seat parliament is even higher, analysts said.
The Jatiya Party, which won 11 seats, is a long-time ally of Hasina's Awami League, as are many of the 61 independent candidates, said Mubashar Hasan, a political scientist at the University of Oslo.
"Almost all the independent candidates who won the parliamentary seats are also part of the Awami League," he added.
Among the victors was Bangladesh cricket team captain Shakib Al Hasan, who won a seat for the ruling party.
Hasina's party faced almost no effective rivals in the seats it contested.
Envoys from China, Russia and neighbouring India were among the first to congratulate Hasina, visiting her at home on Monday and praising her "absolute victory", her office said in a statement.
Beijing's ambassador Yao Wen praised a "long-established friendship" with Dhaka in a statement, underlining the deepening ties during Hasina's 15-year-long rule.
Politics in the country of 170 million people has long been dominated by the rivalry between Hasina, the daughter of the country's founding leader, and two-time premier Khaleda Zia.
Hasina has been the decisive victor since returning to power in a 2009 landslide.
Zia, 78, was convicted of graft in 2018 and is now in ailing health at a hospital in Dhaka.
