Carl Schmitt’s defining thesis was that the core of politics rests on a single, unyielding distinction between friend and enemy. For the German jurist, politics was a structured antagonism—the grouping of society into an "us" and a "them." 

Liberalism, by contrast, seeks to dissolve this boundary, promising to convert enemies into mere competitors and warfare into parliamentary debate. Yet Schmitt viewed this as a dangerous evasion rather than true transcendence. 

A political system that refuses to identify its enemy has not banished conflict; it has merely obscured who benefits from the prevailing order.

When politics is reduced to mere administration and managerial efficiency, public engagement plummets. Deprived of ideological stakes, citizens see no reason to participate, meaning low voter turnout is rarely an institutional failure, but rather a sign that the boundaries separating political choices have ceased to matter. 

The theorist Chantal Mouffe extended this critique, warning that when major political factions converge on a bland, centrist consensus and brand it as political maturity, they do not eradicate antagonism. 

Instead, they displace it. The adversarial energy of a society does not vanish; it drifts toward the periphery, waiting for populist forces willing to name an enemy once again.

This theoretical warning carries acute relevance for contemporary Bangladesh as it attempts to forge a new political settlement following the July Uprising. On the surface, a new alignment appears to be forming, with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) at one pole and Jamaat-e-Islami alongside the National Citizen Party (NCP) at the other. 

Yet this binary is proving illusory. Beneath occasional localized friction, the leadership of these factions displays an unsettling warmth. Joint appearances, shared platforms, and mutual praise between BNP stalwarts and Jamaat leadership have become routine. 

Jamaat’s critique of the BNP is often confined to minor ideological deviations, while its reverence for the BNP’s historical founders frequently outstrips that of the party's own rank and file.

To a Western observer, this cooperation might look like democratic maturity. In a fragile transitional state, however, it creates a dangerous vacuum. By collapsing the ideological distance between the potential government and its primary opposition, the two entities merge into a single political silhouette. 

This consolidation provides the deposed Awami League (AL) with a potent narrative. It allows the former ruling party to frame the new political landscape as a monolithic, managed theater—a mirror image of the pliant, co-opted oppositions that characterized the autocracy of the past decade. 

The danger is not that Bangladesh lacks internal contradictions, but that its current leaders are drawing the lines of antagonism in the wrong place.

Historically, the BNP and Jamaat directed their hostility toward one another, only to retreat into a cozy consensus when the intensity became destabilizing. The first approach misdirected the friend-enemy distinction; the second erased it entirely. 

Both errors feed the same institutional vacuum, one that a highly organized, exiled political machine is patiently waiting to exploit.

The necessary correction requires a clear sovereign decision: the friend-enemy line must be drawn explicitly around the Awami League. The AL cannot be treated as an ordinary competitor within the democratic framework. 

It represents an existential challenge—the force that deployed state violence against its own populace and now bides its time across the border. Consequently, the future of the AL is a matter of national security rather than routine electoral calculation.

It is at this juncture that Schmitt and Mouffe converge. Defining the deposed regime as the ultimate adversary is a foundational sovereign act, and it is precisely this act that makes a healthy, pluralistic politics possible. 

Agonism—a system of robust, peaceful political conflict—is not an alternative to the friend-enemy distinction; it is the product of it, provided the boundary is correctly placed.

By establishing a firm external perimeter that excludes the perpetrators of autocracy, the domestic political arena becomes safe for genuine contestation. The BNP, Jamaat, and the NCP can then act as fierce adversaries rather than existential enemies. 

They can debate economic policy, governance, and social values without restraint because they share a fundamental commitment to a post-revolutionary frontier that stands beyond the AL. One theory builds the defensive wall; the other structures the debate within it.

The benefits of such clarity are immediate. Meaningful antagonism would return to daily governance, ideological stakes would reappear, and voter engagement would follow. In a mature, consolidated democracy, bipartisan consensus is a stabilizing luxury. 

In a state still haunted by the autocracy it recently dismantled, such blurred lines are an open invitation to counter-revolution. The fundamental dilemma facing Bangladesh thus is not whether it possesses an enemy, but whether its new political class has the strategic nerve to name the correct one.

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ASM Aliul Islam is a graduate student at Dalhousie University. He studied International Relations at Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP)