page_title: Khaleda Zia
section_title: Boycotting 2014 election
hierarchical_section_title: Khaleda Zia / Post-premiership (since 2007) / Boycotting 2014 election
caption_attribution_description: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry greets government opposition leader Begum Khaleda Zia at U.S. Embassy Dhaka during a visit to Dhaka, Bangladesh, on August 29, 2016. [State Department Photo/ Public Domain]
context_page_description: Khaleda Zia is a Bangladeshi politician who served as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh from 1991 to 1996, and again from 2001 to 2006. She was the first woman in the country's history and second in the Muslim majority countries to head a democratic government as prime minister. She was the wife of a former President of Bangladesh Ziaur Rahman. She is the current chairperson and leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party which was founded by Rahman in the late 1970s.
  After a military coup in 1982, led by Army Chief General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, Zia helped lead the movement for democracy until the fall of Ershad in 1990. She became the prime minister following the BNP party win in the 1991 general election. She also served briefly in the short-lived government in 1996, when other parties had boycotted the first election. In the next round of general elections of 1996, the Awami League came to power. Her party came to power again in 2001. She has been elected to five separate parliamentary constituencies in the general elections of 1991, 1996 and 2001.
context_section_description: Zia's party took a stance on not participating in the 2014 Bangladeshi general election unless it was administered under a  nonpartisan  caretaker government, but the then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina rejected the demand. The Bangladesh Awami League, led by Hasina, won the election in 232 seats (out of 300). The official counts from Dhaka suggested that the turnout here averaged about 22 percent.
  In 2016, BNP announced its new National Standing Committee, in which Zia retained her position as the chairperson.
  In 2017, the police conducted a raid on Zia's house  search for "anti-state" documents.
caption: US Secretary John Kerry greets Zia at the US Embassy Dhaka (2016)
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