Student Founded National Citizen Party Allies with Jamaat Ahead of Vote

The National Citizen Party, a new political formation created by student leaders who led last year’s mass movement, has reached an electoral seat sharing agreement with Jamaat e Islami, setting off a fierce internal crisis within the fledgling party. The announcement on December 28, 2025 places the student founded NCP within a broader Jamaat led eight party alliance that now includes the Liberal Democratic Party, headed by Col. (retd) Oli Ahmed, as rival forces position themselves for the February 2026 parliamentary election.

The pact has exposed a fault line between the NCP’s stated origins in the July Uprising and the pragmatic calculations of contesting a high stakes national vote in a rapidly reconfigured political field. Thirty party leaders submitted a joint memorandum to NCP convenor Nahid Islam formally opposing the proposed alliance. The memorandum, whose first signatory is identified as Mushfiq Us Saleheen, the NCP’s joint member secretary, is titled, "Principled objections to a potential alliance in light of the accountability of the July Uprising and party values."

The memo frames the Jamaat alliance as incompatible with the party’s declared ideology and its public stance on accountability related to the uprising that culminated in the removal of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina last year. Two ranking members of the NCP resigned in protest, further deepening the leadership crisis and raising immediate questions about the party’s cohesion and capacity to mobilize its grassroots base.

The political context helps explain both the urgency and controversy of the move. The interim government overseeing the transition to the February election has said that the Awami League is barred from contesting the polls and has been deregistered by the Election Commission, a status publicly affirmed by Shafikul Alam, press secretary to the Chief Adviser. With the dominant party sidelined, opposition groups are accelerating realignments and seat negotiations, creating incentives for unlikely partnerships that would have been politically contentious in normal times.

The NCP leadership faces a strategic dilemma. A seat sharing pact with Jamaat e Islami may improve short term electoral calculus by consolidating an Islamist led bloc, yet it risks alienating the student activist constituency that propelled the party into prominence. The memorandum’s appeal to accountability and democratic ethics suggests the split is not merely tactical, but rooted in competing narratives about what the July Uprising represented and who its legitimate heirs are.

For regional observers and the international community the development will be watched as a barometer of Bangladesh’s democratic transition and political normalization after the upheaval of 2024. Questions will focus on which constituencies the pact covers, how the agreement will be ratified within NCP structures, and whether further defections will follow. With less than two months until the vote, the alliance marks a volatile turn in a fluid campaign season and underscores how transitional politics can force rapid compromises that cut against founding ideals.