Bangladesh’s parliament elected Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the long-serving secretary-general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, as the country’s twenty-third president on Thursday afternoon. He took 255 votes to 88 for Colonel (retd.) Oli Ahmad, the Liberal Democratic Party chairman standing for an eleven-party alliance. The Chief Election Commissioner, AMM Nasir Uddin, declared the result. The oath is set for Bangabhaban on Friday evening.
The arithmetic was never in doubt — the BNP holds a two-thirds majority in the chamber, and 349 members were eligible to vote. What made the day unusual was that a vote was held at all. Bangladesh’s presidents have been returned unopposed since October 1991, when the country moved to a parliamentary system and the office became largely ceremonial. Under Article 48(3) of the constitution, the president acts on the prime minister’s advice in nearly all matters, the appointment of the prime minister and the chief justice being the exceptions.
Those exceptions are the point. In a country whose recent politics have twice been settled outside the ballot box, the presidency matters most in the interval when normal government has stopped working — as caretaker, as commander-in-chief on paper, as the person who signs. Filling it by contest rather than acclamation is a modest procedural fact with a long shadow. This is the first presidential vote since the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s fifteen-year government, and the first under a parliament seated at February’s general election.
A ceremonial office, filled for once by counting.