How a Nobel Laureate Tried to Rebuild a Broken Nation — and What Was Left Behind

February 19, 2026  ·  18-minute read

University of Salford Press Office, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Read our full illustrated report here: https://thenyeditorial.github.io/Yunus-Government-Outcome-Analysis/

On the morning of February 17, 2026, an 85-year-old economist addressed his country for the last time as its leader. Muhammad Yunus, the man who had spent decades fighting poverty through microcredit and who was summoned from Paris at a moment of national crisis, spoke with the quiet gravity of someone handing back a burden he never asked for. “The interim government is stepping down,” he said. “But let the practice of democracy, freedom of speech, and fundamental rights that has begun not be halted.” With that, the most unusual chapter in Bangladesh’s political history came to a close.

The nation he left behind was, by most measures, more fractured than the one he inherited. The economy had slowed to a 36-year low. Hundreds had been killed in mob violence. Religious minorities faced an escalating wave of persecution. And yet, something had also been built: a constitutional reform charter approved by nearly 73 percent of voters in a national referendum, the first credible election in over a decade, and a judicial reckoning with the abuses of the Hasina era that, however imperfect, broke a long pattern of impunity.

Yunus’s legacy is not a simple balance sheet of successes and failures. It is the story of a transitional government caught between revolutionary expectations and institutional reality — between the dream of a “new Bangladesh” and the stubborn persistence of the old one.

I. The Inheritance

How a quota protest became a revolution — and why a microfinance pioneer became head of state

The story begins not with Yunus but with a seemingly narrow grievance. In June 2024, Bangladesh’s Supreme Court invalidated a 2018 government decision abolishing a quota system that reserved a third of civil service jobs for descendants of independence war veterans. For millions of young Bangladeshis — in a country where youth unemployment exceeded 30 percent — this was not an abstract legal question. It was a gatekeeper to the only stable livelihood many of them could imagine.

What started as a student protest against quotas rapidly metastasized into a nationwide revolt against 15 years of creeping authoritarianism. Sheikh Hasina’s government responded with staggering brutality: live ammunition, drones, helicopters, and a telecommunications blackout. By the time Hasina fled to India on August 5, the UN would later estimate that approximately 1,400 people had been killed — the worst episode of political violence in Bangladesh since the 1971 Liberation War.

In this power vacuum, the Students Against Discrimination movement — the Gen Z organizers who had catalyzed the uprising — made an extraordinary demand: they wanted the Nobel Prize-winning economist, then 84, to lead the country. It was a choice born of desperation and strategic logic. Yunus was the one figure who commanded both domestic moral authority and international credibility. He had been a target of Hasina’s regime, facing what he called trumped-up charges. And he was, critically, not a politician — a virtue in a country where decades of political turbulence had left institutions fragile and public trust eroded.

“If you can imagine fifteen years of earthquake — what do you see? Pieces. So you have to find the pieces to put together to start again.”

— Muhammad Yunus, NPR interview, September 2025

Yunus was sworn in on August 8 by President Mohammed Shahabuddin. The cabinet he assembled was eclectic: academics, civil society veterans, a former UN official, and two student leaders from the uprising itself. It was, constitutionally, an anomaly — an extra-constitutional government legitimized only by the appellate court’s invocation of the “doctrine of necessity.” But the mandate from the streets was unambiguous: reform everything, punish the old regime, and then hold elections.

II. The Blueprints

Eleven commissions, 84 proposals, and the most ambitious reform agenda in Bangladesh’s history

Yunus moved with surprising speed on the reform front. On September 11, 2024 — barely a month after taking office — he announced the formation of six reform commissions targeting the constitution, the electoral system, the judiciary, the police, the anti-corruption apparatus, and public administration. Five more commissions followed, covering health, women’s affairs, labor rights, mass media, and local government. A former IMF economist, Ahsan H. Mansur, was installed as central bank governor to tackle a banking crisis that had metastasized under Hasina’s patronage networks.

The Constitutional Reform Commission, led by Illinois State University political scientist Ali Riaz, was tasked with reimagining the Bangladeshi state. Their report, submitted in January 2025, was radical in scope: replacing the unitary, prime-minister-dominated system with one featuring a bicameral parliament, term limits, an empowered presidency, stronger judicial independence, and expanded fundamental rights. Secularism, socialism, and nationalism — the foundational principles of the 1972 constitution — were recommended for removal, replaced by a commitment to pluralism.

These recommendations were funneled through a National Consensus Commission, which spent months negotiating with political parties. The result — the July National Charter, signed by 25 parties in October 2025 — consolidated 84 reform proposals, 48 of them constitutional, into a single document to be put to referendum alongside the general election.

But the process revealed challenges. While major political parties, including the BNP, engaged with the Charter process, some raised concerns about specific mechanisms such as proportional representation. The Awami League, Bangladesh’s other historic party, banned in May 2025, was not at the table at all. The absence of a major political constituency from the reform process remained a source of tension.

III. The Economy of Fragments

GDP at a 36-year low, 3 million pushed into poverty, and a garment industry in crisis

What Yunus inherited was not merely a country in political transition but one whose economic foundations had been systematically hollowed out. The “Bangladesh miracle” narrative had been obscuring structural rot: a banking sector riddled with non-performing loans, a tax-to-GDP ratio of just 7.4 percent, and inflation that had climbed to 11.7 percent by July 2024.

The administration’s macroeconomic moves were orthodox and largely sound. Mansur hiked interest rates, dissolved the boards of 11 troubled banks, and let the exchange rate float more freely. Inflation came down from 11.6 percent to 8.2 percent by October 2025. Foreign exchange reserves stabilized. The IMF completed its fifth review, describing “notable progress in maintaining macroeconomic stability.”

But these were stabilization measures, not transformation. Between July and December 2024, the economy shed an estimated 2.1 million jobs, with women accounting for more than 85 percent of those losses. Nearly 245 factories shut down between August 2024 and July 2025. The World Bank projected an additional three million Bangladeshis pushed into poverty in 2025. GDP growth slowed to 3.3 percent in FY2024-25 — its lowest in 36 years. The Trump administration’s 37 percent tariff on Bangladesh in April 2025 dealt a further blow to the garment sector before being reduced to 20 percent.

The structural critique was sharper still. Private investment collapsed. Credit markets seized up. The budget was described across the political spectrum as conservative, IMF-driven, and devoid of transformative ambition. The gap between the rhetoric of a “new Bangladesh” and the reality of austerity-era governance proved to be one of the deepest sources of public disappointment.

IV. The Violence Beneath

Mob killings, minority persecution, and the unraveling of public order

No failure of the Yunus government was more visceral than its inability to maintain basic law and order. The July uprising had shattered the coercive apparatus of the state. Police stations were abandoned during a nationwide strike. The army was deployed for civil duties for the entire 18 months.

The scale of mob violence was staggering. According to Ain o Salish Kendra, 197 people were killed in lynchings or mob attacks in 2025 alone. Political violence, driven by a fragmented security landscape and the collapse of civilian policing, became a defining crisis of the interim period.

The violence against religious minorities — particularly the Hindu community — drew the most international attention. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council documented over 2,000 incidents of communal violence, including at least 61 killings, 28 instances of sexual violence, and 95 attacks on places of worship. In December 2025, a 27-year-old Hindu garment worker named Dipu Chandra Das was beaten to death by a mob, his body hung from a tree and set on fire, after being accused of blasphemy.

“The government is not merely ignoring these crimes. Its silence is an act of complicity.”

— Nimchandra Bhoumik, minority rights leader

The dynamics were layered and contested. The Yunus administration insisted the attacks were primarily political rather than communal. Police investigations supported this framing. But the UN Human Rights Office found that religious identity and communal tensions, alongside political affiliation, played a role. The government’s oscillation between acknowledgment and denial alienated the very communities that were most vulnerable.

The hard truth is that the Yunus government faced an impossible security trilemma: it needed the army’s cooperation to maintain order, the political parties’ cooperation to advance reforms, and the Islamist parties’ cooperation to maintain its governing coalition. Cracking down aggressively on communal violence risked alienating the very forces it depended on.

V. The Reckoning

Trying a former prime minister, banning the ruling party, and the paradox of transitional justice

The International Crimes Tribunal, originally created by Hasina herself, was reconstituted to investigate the July 2024 massacre. On November 17, 2025, it found Sheikh Hasina guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced her to death. The prosecution presented 54 witnesses and audio recordings in which Hasina appeared to order the use of lethal force. The tribunal found her to be the “mastermind, conductor and superior commander” of attacks that killed approximately 1,400 protesters.

But the process was profoundly flawed. Hasina was tried in absentia from India, not represented by counsel of her choosing, and denied fundamental rights her own constitution guarantees. Human Rights Watch warned of serious fair trial concerns. The Oxford Law Blog argued that the death sentence was counterproductive — generating diplomatic sympathy for Hasina, strengthening her asylum claim, and making extradition virtually impossible.

The banning of the Awami League was the most consequential and controversial decision of the Yunus era. The party that had led Bangladesh’s independence, won millions of votes in every election it contested, and still commanded deep loyalty was excised from democratic life. In the February election, 32 percent of referendum voters — more than 22.5 million people — voted against the July Charter. In Gopalganj, the “no” vote won overwhelmingly. The absence of the Awami League did not eliminate its constituency. It merely rendered that constituency voiceless — and potentially radicalized.

VI. The Tightrope

The hidden power struggle between Yunus, the military, the students, and the political parties

The Yunus government’s most underappreciated achievement may simply be that it survived long enough to hold an election. In May 2025, Yunus nearly resigned. The New York Times reported he had drafted a resignation speech. The immediate triggers were multiple: political tensions over a disputed mayoral election intensified; the army chief publicly demanded elections by December 2025 and challenged the government’s authority on the Rohingya corridor and Chattogram port; and the student-led NCP pushed for delayed elections to ensure deeper reforms.

The structural problem was a trust deficit created by the absence of a clear election timeline. Each stakeholder — the army, the political parties, the students, Jamaat-e-Islami, and the international community — had incompatible priorities and timelines. Each had just enough leverage to veto but not enough to govern. The result was governance by sequential crisis management rather than strategic initiative.

VII. The Final Act

An election, a referendum, and the dawn of a new era

On February 12, 2026, Bangladesh voted. The Commonwealth Observer Group described it as one of the most significant electoral exercises of 2026. Voter turnout was 59.88 percent. The BNP won a commanding 209 seats out of 299 contested, securing a decisive mandate from the people. Jamaat-e-Islami won 68 seats. The National Citizen Party, the student-led movement-turned-political-party, won six seats in its debut.

The referendum results were equally significant. Approximately 68 percent endorsed the July Charter, giving democratic legitimacy to the reform agenda. The 32 percent “no” vote represented a reminder that national healing will require listening to all voices.

The election delivered a clear result: the BNP, under the leadership of Tarique Rahman, secured a two-thirds parliamentary majority — a strong mandate that positions the party to lead Bangladesh’s next phase of democratic consolidation. With the July Charter approved by referendum, the new government inherits both a popular mandate and a reform blueprint. The Charter proposes a bicameral parliament, proportional representation in the upper house, and term limits — ambitious structural changes that the BNP is now uniquely positioned to shepherd into law. Rahman’s post-election call for national unity signaled an awareness that the moment demands statesmanship, and his party’s decisive victory gives it the political capital to deliver.

VIII. The Verdict on the Experiment

Neither triumph nor tragedy — but something more complex and more instructive

What worked: The July Charter, approved by referendum, provides a constitutional roadmap no previous government produced. The 84 proposals represent a genuine attempt to address the structural pathologies of Bangladeshi politics. The February 2026 election was the first credible election in over a decade — a non-trivial accomplishment. The transition from interim to elected government was peaceful.

What was mixed: Macroeconomic interventions were competent but insufficient — the government prevented a Sri Lanka-style crash but failed to address structural inequality or youth unemployment. The Hasina trial represented unprecedented accountability but was marred by fair trial failures, a death sentence that made extradition impossible, and the exclusion of millions from the political process.

What failed: The surge in violence against minorities constitutes the gravest moral failure of the Yunus period. Over 2,000 documented incidents of communal violence left Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, and indigenous communities exposed to persecution not seen in decades. Institutional reform stalled at the paper stage — the police, courts, and bureaucracy remained largely unreformed.

IX. A New Hope

What Bangladesh’s transition reveals — and the promise of what comes next

The Yunus government’s experience illuminates a paradox that extends beyond Bangladesh. Revolutionary moments generate transformative expectations, but the institutions capable of delivering transformation — parliaments, courts, responsive bureaucracies — are precisely the institutions that revolutions tend to destroy or delegitimize. The moment when change is most desired is often the moment when the capacity for change is at its lowest.

Yunus was chosen precisely because he was not a politician — but governing is, inescapably, a political act. The reform commissions could diagnose problems with scholarly precision; building the coalitions to fix them required the messy, transactional arts of politics that Yunus never fully mastered. His supporters saw his posture as integrity. His critics saw it as passivity. Both were right.

Bangladesh’s February 2026 election produced more than a government — it produced a renewed democratic covenant. The BNP’s decisive mandate, combined with the Charter’s popular endorsement, creates a foundation for the kind of institutional rebuilding that Bangladesh has long needed. The challenges ahead remain formidable: economic recovery, minority protection, and the patient work of translating reform proposals into functioning institutions. But for the first time in over a decade, Bangladesh has an elected government with both the legitimacy and the legislative power to pursue structural change. The July Charter is a blueprint — and the nation has chosen its builders.

“I came from another world. I’ll go back to my world.”

— Muhammad Yunus, on whether he would stand for election

Muhammad Yunus returned to his world on February 17, 2026. The experiment he led was imperfect, constrained, and at times deeply painful. But the democratic transition he shepherded — from uprising to reform to election — gave Bangladesh something it had not possessed in over a decade: a credible, popularly elected government with a reform mandate endorsed by the people themselves. The revolution of 2024 demanded a new Bangladesh. Whether that promise is fulfilled now rests with an elected government that has both the authority and the opportunity to build it. For a nation that has endured so much, that opportunity — fragile and precious — is itself a kind of hope.