General elections were held in Bangladesh on 29 December 2008. The two main parties in the election were the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by Khaleda Zia, and the Bangladesh Awami League Party, led by Sheikh Hasina. The Bangladesh Awami League Party formed a fourteen-party Grand Alliance including Ershad's Jatiya Party, while the BNP formed a four-party alliance which included the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami. The election was originally scheduled for January 2007, but it was postponed by a military-controlled caretaker government for an extended period of time.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party is a major political party in Bangladesh. Founded on 1 September 1978 by the late Bangladeshi president Ziaur Rahman, with a view of uniting people with a nationalist ideology, BNP later came out as one of the two most dominant parties in Bangladesh, along with its archrival Awami League. Initially being a big tent centrist party, it moved towards more right-wing politics later.