The First Real Choice in Fifteen Years

Bangladeshi diaspora voter registration has begun across East Asia, South America, Africa, and now North America, with Europe and the Middle East opening soon.

Even writing that sentence feels surreal.

An entire generation of us (Millennials and Gen Z) has grown into adulthood without ever participating in a free and fair national election. Our adolescence and entire adulthood unfolded under a political order where outcomes were decided the night before polling day.

So, the ability to vote for the first time feels like stepping into sunlight after fifteen years indoors.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh itself has come roaring awake: crowds arguing in tea stalls, candidates campaigning openly, young people debating, older generations defending their choices, memes ricocheting across the internet, campaign songs drifting through neighborhoods, rallies blooming on every corner. After years of suffocation, the country is loud again, gloriously and defiantly loud. Even from across an ocean, that energy reaches you. It’s contagious.

But as registration opens overseas, I keep hearing a familiar refrain from Bangladeshis abroad -- lines so deeply internalized they now sound instinctive: everyone is bad, nothing changes, there’s no real choice. Not everyone says this, of course, but the sentiment surfaces often enough to matter.

This reflex did not grow on its own. It is the psychological residue of fifteen years of Hasina’s fascist rule, a period that insisted alternatives did not exist and cast every other political force as catastrophic. When a regime repeats “there is no alternative” long enough, people absorb it. And when that regime collapses, the conditioning doesn’t vanish with it. The vocabulary of hopelessness survives longer than the authoritarianism that produced it.

Authoritarianism does not need tanks on the streets to endure. It survives in the quiet assumption that alternatives are illusions, when people flatten every political actor into the same category and stop believing their choices matter. It demands no analysis and even less courage. This mindset, this exhausted, learned hopelessness often outlives the system that created it.

And Bangladesh is not the first country to face this. Transitional periods everywhere have followed a similar emotional pattern. After Pinochet fell in Chile, after communist regimes collapsed across Eastern Europe, and after Tunisia and Egypt opened their political systems for the first time in decades, voters carried a similar fatalism or cynicism into the ballot box. Freedom does not feel real simply because the system has changed. People who have lived under a dominant authority for years often struggle to believe meaningful differences are possible again.

Political scientists widely document this as a form of “transitional political cynicism” -- the belief that all choices are equally bad, shaped not by actual options but by years of psychological conditioning that taught people alternatives don’t exist. Every newly restored democracy confronts some version of this inherited skepticism. Bangladeshis abroad are no exception; we carry the same conditioning into this moment.

This is why democracy depends on the belief that choices exist. Authoritarianism depends on the belief that they do not. Democracy is not sustained by perfect choices; it is sustained by the ability to correct them. Healthy republics allow citizens to elect someone, evaluate them, demand better, vote them out, and try again. That ordinary cycle of accountability is what Bangladesh lost -- and what Bangladesh has finally regained. That is what makes this moment so extraordinary.

Even if the candidate you or I support wins nothing this year, that is irrelevant. Democratic agency is not built in one cycle. It accumulates through repeated acts of showing up. Movements grow because people show up consistently, not because they win instantly. We may not pick flawlessly, but we will finally be able to pick. And if the person we elect disappoints us, we can hold them accountable in five years instead of surrendering to inevitability for another two decades.

Diaspora Bangladeshis now face a strange disorientation. We are watching a country rediscover its political oxygen while we still grapple with the emotional memory of suffocation. And for the first time, the diaspora has the legal right to participate in a real election. That shift is far from symbolic. It rewrites the political relationship between Bangladesh and millions of its citizens living abroad.

And we are not outsiders to this process. Diaspora Bangladeshis support families, send remittances, fund education, stabilize entire communities, and carry Bangladesh with them wherever they go. Our participation is not a privilege granted; it is a right long delayed.

Inside Bangladesh, voters can judge candidates by tangible local work: the repaired road, the responsive MP, the everyday governance they see with their own eyes. That makes sense for those living inside the country’s rhythm. But diaspora voters make decisions from afar. We do not witness daily successes or failures. National choices can feel abstract, overwhelming, or emotionally distant.

But confusion is not the same thing as having no choice. Feeling uncertain does not mean all options are identical. What this moment asks of us is not perfect political clarity but the humility to accept that democracy involves trial, error, correction, and relearning. We may misjudge. We may choose imperfectly. But we now have the freedom to demand better and to vote differently next time.

If you feel overwhelmed, that feeling is normal. Transitional moments always create confusion. No one expects you to know today whom you will vote for in February. Registration is not a commitment. It takes minutes and simply preserves your right to decide later, a right that an entire generation grew up without ever touching.

We do not need to be perfect voters, and we do not need to know every answer. In a transitional period, what matters is the willingness to participate and the courage to relearn what authoritarianism tried to take away: that our voices count and that democracy is a skill we can rebuild together.