Key Stories Shaping Emerging Markets: Thai Election Fuels Stock Market Rise, EM Rises as Wall Street Looks Global, The Race for Brazil Rare Earths, US-Bangladesh Trade Deal, Uber Buys Getir Stake from Mubadala
Lima’s commitment to centering worker’s voices and futures, and the combination of pragmatism and integrity that drives her have been on full display in the past two decades, long before the most recent elections were announced. Equally at ease organizing in the industrial belts as in negotiating policy reform in Dhaka or Geneva, she is exactly the kind of candidate the country needs right now.
If states tighten control over digital spaces to prevent manipulation, how do democracies function? How do we distinguish between organic, bottom-up people’s movements and those that are partially orchestrated or externally influenced?
A Bangladesh that wants diplomatic space to grow must first secure strategic space. If it wants autonomy, it must first make coercion unprofitable. That is the hard, unromantic truth of the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.
What we have here is selective presentation designed to secure approval through incomplete information. The ballot emphasizes what is popular; the fine print includes what is contentious.
Bangladesh will remember the outgoing Chief Adviser with respect for stepping up when the country desperately needed him. His record in government is, predictably, mixed. Was it fair to have expected more?
Whatever the causes, Bangladesh cannot wait indefinitely. It must build damage-reducing infrastructure without delay. This does not replace a water-sharing settlement; it reduces damage while politics drags on, and it must be designed with geo-politics in mind.
While it would be presumptuous to predict a Jamaat victory in the upcoming elections on February 12, the BNP and other secular and liberal democratic parties must acknowledge the emergence of a Third Party with a moderate Islamic agenda that could gain power in the next round of elections in 2031.
Society needs a new compact to rein in the empire of corporate giants. This is as true for Bangladesh as it is for the rest of the world. Else we will all descend into the servitude of a new feudal system headed by giant corporations and the handful of their beneficiaries.
Bangladesh needs leaders willing to say what I believe must be said: Crimes against humanity warrant organizational accountability, but only through a judicial process that respects rule of law. That is the stance Tarique must take.
The Korail high-rise promise is not just a construction project. It is a governance challenge shaped by misaligned incentives, fragmented land control, extreme density, contested beneficiary selection, weak tenure enforcement, and post move-in affordability.
Arithmetic still points to a BNP-led alliance winning, with a Jamaat-led alliance more likely to land as the principal opposition. The caveat is that Bangladesh has not had credible elections since 2008, so any confident prediction about voting behaviour is just that: An informed forecast, not a guarantee.
Turning water into a nationalist symbol may mobilize sentiment, but it has never produced water -- and it has often delayed the reordering of ties that scarcity now makes unavoidable.
Whether it is a party that markets itself as the sole heir of 1971, or a hardline movement that once mocked that struggle and now sanitizes its record, the exploitation is the same. Both seek to convert freedom into political capital. Both demand that citizens forget what they saw and felt. Both ask us to trade memory for myth.
Is tinkering with the formal rules of the game the triumph of hope over experience (this time politics will be different)? Or a more technocratic faith in the power of institutional architecture to push back against the potent political imperatives of rents and control (we can design our way to democracy)? Either way, fixing the rules seems a misplaced focus when history has shown that the amassing of political power rapidly renders such niceties ornamental.
