It has been almost four months since the country’s 13th national parliament election. In this post-uprising election, we observed that Awami League is out and banned, Bangladesh Nationalist Party governs with a two-thirds majority, and Jamaat-e-Islami’s eleven-party alliance has stepped into the role of major opposition.
But the machinery of money behind the curtain looks remarkably familiar.
And it is worth asking, amid renewed talk of institutional reform under the July Charter, whether one specific proposal – a public funding system (PFS) for political parties – stands any real chance in Bangladesh, or whether it is destined to become one more law that exists beautifully on paper and nowhere else.
The logic of a PFS is simple and, in the abstract, attractive. If the state finances parties directly in their campaign costs, basic operations, perhaps candidate stipends, parties no longer need to depend on private financiers to fund their survival.
Disclosure becomes easier to mandate because the money has a traceable, public origin. In theory, the patron-client networks on candidate selection and governance should then be mitigated through PFS.
But theory assumes something Bangladesh’s politics has rarely supplied: that winning office and serving the state are the same project. They are not.
For any party here, the first and overriding objective is to win, and then to keep, power. The welfare of the state arrives, if at all, as a downstream consequence rather than the driving motive.
Elections are the mechanism through which power is contested, and money is the fuel of that contest. But in Bangladesh, the money in the conversation is not channelled through transparent party treasuries in most cases.
Rather, the money moves through opaque chains of patronage such as nomination sales, undisclosed corporate transfers, and increasingly, dynastic family wealth standing in for institutional financing altogether.
Studies indicate that the professional background of our Parliament has undergone a radical shift: in 1973, only 18% of MPs were businessmen; by 2024, that figure reached a staggering 66%.
But Bangladesh is not short of paper remedies for this, at least on paper. The Representation of the People Order, 1972 – amended in 2008, 2018, and again in 2025 ahead of February’s vote – requires candidates and parties to disclose assets, liabilities, and campaign expenditure.
But in practice, there is little penalty architecture behind the disclosure requirement, and enforcement against violations is the exception rather than the rule. For instance, although the Election Commission of Bangladesh requires detailed expenditure reports from political parties, only 58% of MPs submitted their mandatory financial disclosures in 2024.
This is precisely the template a PFS should worry about inheriting. Because, in a climate where institutions are compromised to interests of the powerful, successful implementation of policies like PFS is questionable.
Bangladesh’s political landscape has historically had an environment of oligarchy and kleptocracy. We have to bear in mind that politicians are rational actors. Now why would party leaderships behave any differently with public money than they have with disclosure law in this context?
Bangladesh’s political landscape has historically been a duopoly. Previously Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party dominated in competing for power. Now the power dynamic revolves around BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami.
But the structure of power for either AL, BNP or JI have more or less stayed the same as the power structure did not rise to dominance through open, audited competition.
To varying degrees, the rise of power among all the mentioned parties gained momentum on patronage chains that a genuine disclosure regime would expose.
Now asking such leaderships to neutrally implement a system that audits the very mechanism of their own ascent is asking them to self-incriminate. So, the alarming question is: do Bangladesh’s oversight bodies have the independence to enforce a neutral PFS against reluctant ruling parties?
The same constitutional levers that hollowed out RPO disclosure enforcement under previous dominant-party rule remain available to whichever party holds office next.
A public funding law, however well drafted, is only as credible as the body auditing it – and that body’s independence cannot be assumed into existence by the same statute that creates the funding.
This is where the risk of isomorphic mimicry becomes real.
Countries like Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom have successful public financing systems.
But the fuel behind their success with PFS is that they have multiparty competition, an independent judiciary, and a bureaucracy insulated from the ruling party where implementing PFS is much easier due to having institutions upon which political parties are held accountable.
Importing the form of public funding without those underlying conditions risks producing exactly what Bangladesh’s reform history is full of: a law that satisfies a donor checklist or constitutional reform commission’s recommendations, while changing nothing about how nominations are actually bought and sold.
So, does this mean implementing PFS is inherently inapplicable in Bangladesh? In reality, to see the success of PFS, certain policy gaps need to be addressed first.
Public money should follow proof of independent, court-enforceable auditing, building on the 2025 RPO amendments rather than duplicating their toothlessness. Election Commission appointments need insulation through cross-party consensus and judicial vetting before any subsidy regime is trusted to police itself.
Parties that hold genuinely open, contested nominations can be rewarded through tiering the funding. And a phased rollout – beginning at the union or upazila level before any national subsidy – would let institutions build enforcement capacity under lower stakes before the real money arrives.
Political scientists studying hybrid regimes have stated that formal democratic institutions can persist almost unchanged in form while their function is steadily redirected toward whoever holds executive power at the given moment. Bangladesh’s RPO has followed this pattern as each amendment adds more paper rather than more constraints.
So, introducing PFS as a headline reform, without enforcement built first, will not purify Bangladeshi politics of its transactional core. It will simply hand the same old exchange a new envelope – and the hands passing it will still be the ones least interested in being watched.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
