DHAKA: One of Bangladesh’s main political parties warned on Wednesday that unrest was brewing over the long wait for fresh elections following last year’s overthrow of the South Asian nation’s autocratic ex-premier.
Bangladesh is under the de facto leadership of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhummad Yunus, 84, who took office last August after a student-led revolution forced former leader Sheikh Hasina into exile.
Yunus is helming a caretaker administration that says it has a responsibility to enact democratic reforms before it holds a fresh election, which it has promised to stage by June next year at the latest.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), widely tipped to win the next poll, met with Yunus in the capital Dhaka in a fruitless effort to press him on the vote’s timetable.
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“We are not at all satisfied,” BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir told reporters after the meeting.
“We made our position clear: if the election is not held by December, the political, economic, and social situation will take a turn for the worse,” he said.
Alamgir said his party had extended its full support to the reforms spearheaded by the caretaker government, but that did not warrant delaying the election any further.
“If the reform proposals remain unmet, they can be implemented by the political party that forms the government after the election,” he said.
Asif Nazrul, a member of Yunus’ administration, told reporters in response that the current government was “not keen to cling to power for its own sake”.
He said the government was committed to putting on trial members of Hasina’s government for the killing of protesters in the weeks before its toppling, as well as implementing some key reforms, before the polls take place.
“We cannot justify ourselves or answer the nation if we fail to complete even a single trial before holding an election,” Nazrul said.
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