Bangladesh’s interim government, installed after last year’s mass uprising, warned Saturday that national unity is crucial to “prevent the return of authoritarianism.”
Since former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was ousted by student-led protests in August 2024 – ending her 15-year iron-fisted rule – the South Asian nation of 170 million has faced ongoing political turmoil.
Following a week of street protests by rival parties in the capital, Dhaka, the government led by Muhammad Yunus cautioned that power struggles threaten recent progress and urged the public to fully support its efforts.
“Broader unity is essential to maintain national stability, organize free and fair elections, justice, and reform, and permanently prevent the return of authoritarianism in the country,” it said in a statement.
Yunus, the 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who returned from exile at the behest of protesters last year, said he has a duty to implement democratic reforms before elections, due by June 2026 at the latest.
However, the government warned it had faced “unreasonable demands, deliberately provocative and jurisdictionally overreaching statements,” which it said had been “continuously obstructing” its work.
Sources in his office and a key political ally said Thursday that microfinance pioneer Yunus had threatened to quit.
“If the government’s autonomy, reform efforts, justice process, fair election plan, and normal operations are obstructed to the point of making its duties unmanageable, it will, with the people, take the necessary steps,” Saturday’s statement said, without providing further details.
Wahiduddin Mahmud, who heads the finance and planning ministry, insisted Yunus will not step down early.
“We are going to carry out the responsibilities assigned to us,” Mahmud told reporters Saturday. “We can’t simply abandon our duties.”
Yunus held talks Saturday evening with key political parties, including those who have protested against the government this month.
His press secretary, Shafiqul Alam, said the parties all had “full trust” in Yunus, with an all-party meeting scheduled for Sunday.
Yunus met leaders of the powerful Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), seen as the election front-runners, who are pushing hard for polls to be held by December.
“Any excuse to delay the election may open the door for the return of dictatorship,” senior BNP leader Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain said after the meeting.
“The interim government and its allies will be held responsible for such a consequence.”
Yunus has said polls could be held as early as December but that holding them later – with the deadline of June – would give the government more time for reform.
But Hossain said reforms, justice and elections were not “mutually exclusive goals.”
According to Bangladeshi media and military sources, Army Chief Gen. Waker-Uz-Zaman also said this week that elections should be held by December, aligning with BNP demands.
Bangladesh has a long history of military coups, and the army retains a powerful role.
The upcoming elections will be the first since Hasina fled to India, where she remains in self-imposed exile, defying an arrest warrant to face trial for crimes against humanity related to last year’s police crackdown on protesters, during which at least 1,400 people were killed.
Shafiqur Rahman, leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim-majority nation’s largest Islamist party, said after his meeting with Yunus that he had asked for an election timetable – saying he was open to a later date if it allowed for reforms.
He also said he sought “progress in the ongoing trials” of those from Hasina’s ousted regime.
Nahid Islam, leader of the National Citizen Party (NCP), made up of many students who spearheaded the uprising that ended Hasina’s rule, has said he wants later elections to allow time for “fundamental reforms.”
He fears rival parties want swift elections to “assume power.”
Speaking after meeting with Yunus, he said the NCP had “demanded a specific roadmap for reforms, trials and the election of a constituent assembly.”
Islam, an ally of Yunus who previously served in his cabinet, warned Saturday that he had seen “indications” that a “military-backed government could re-emerge – one that is anti-democratic and anti-people.”
