Yunus Under Pressure as BNP, Military and Student Bloc Clash Over Election Roadmap

On May 24, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) called on interim Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus to dissolve his cabinet and hold national elections by December—a move that marked the party’s most assertive return to power since the ouster of Sheikh Hasina’s regime.

As reported by PTI, standing committee member Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain delivered the message at interim Yunus’s official Jamuna residence, saying, “We have called for completing the reforms quickly and holding the national election by December.”

The BNP, led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, has been treading carefully since its re-entry into the political foreground following last year’s student-led uprising. But this meeting marked a strategic escalation. Not only did Hossain call for a national election by year’s end, he demanded that Yunus reconstitute his cabinet entirely, by removing what the party called “controversial advisers”

This wasn’t their first time making the ask. Standing committee member Salahuddin Ahmed told PTI reporters the BNP had already submitted a written statement urging Yunus to remove the three names most fiercely opposed by the party: Mahfuj Alam, Asif Mahmud Shojib Bhuiyan, and Khalilur Rahman

Alam and Bhuiyan, both student leaders of the July 2024 movement that ousted Sheikh Hasina’s government, were given control of the youth and sports and information ministries, respectively. Their appointment is what the BNP sees as a red flag: institutionalising the student uprising that brought Yunus to power while sidelining other political stakeholders. Khalilur Rahman, the third name on the list, is a former diplomat and the current national security adviser.

“The government was pursuing three agendas: reform, trial of leaders of deposed premier Hasina’s regime and the election,” Hossain said,but made clear the BNP was no longer willing to wait for one to follow the other.

The underlying power struggle, however, extends beyond political parties. It cuts into the military chain of command. Three days before the BNP’s meeting, Yunus met with Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman and the heads of the navy and air force. Their message echoed the BNP’s: elections must be held by December. Zaman later called a meeting at Dhaka Cantonment and said he had been “unaware of several strategic decisions despite the military’s active role.”

That tension boiled over into policy. The military has voiced opposition to a proposed humanitarian corridor for delivering aid to Myanmar’s Rakhine State, an initiative reportedly supported by Yunus’s team. “The army decided to be tough against rampant ‘mob justice’ in discharging their law enforcement duties,” the report said, pointing to a more assertive posture from the generals

Yunus, who had threatened to resign just days earlier, citing that “the situation is such that he cannot work,” was persuaded to stay on by advisers and student leaders “He (Yunus) is definitely staying,” said planning adviser Wahiduddin Mahmud after an unscheduled cabinet meeting on May 24.

But staying hasn’t calmed the storm. The student-led National Citizen Party (NCP), largely formed out of the protest platform Students Against Discrimination (SAD), is now in open conflict with the BNP. The BNP demanded the removal of SAD-aligned ministers; the NCP responded by demanding the removal of advisers they accuse of being BNP proxies.

At the heart of the impasse is not just the election date, but the legitimacy of who gets to oversee the transition. Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic party, backed a different timetable: “We have proposed two possible time frames (for polls) – either mid-February 2026, if all the reforms are done, or immediately after Ramadan, if reforms take a bit longer,” said Jamaat chief Shafiqur Rahman.

The NCP is pushing for local elections before a national one again, a position directly opposed by the BNP. Still, Yunus’s camp insists it has cross-party backing. “The national election will be held sometime between December and June of next year,” said his press secretary, Shafiqul Alam, adding that “all three major political parties” expressed support for the timelines. That confidence, however, sits atop a political minefield. The military remains unconvinced. BNP is positioning for an early vote. The NCP wants structural reforms before the ballot. And all of it plays out under the shadow of Hasina’s dismantled Awami League, now disbanded under a revised anti-terror law passed by Yunus’s administration earlier this month.

Behind closed doors, the advisory council issued a sharp warning: “The Council discussed how unreasonable demands, deliberately provocative and ‘jurisdictionally overreaching statements’, and disruptive programmes have been continuously obstructing the normal functioning environment”. But obstruction is now the operative condition of Bangladeshi politics. No roadmap has been finalised. No alliance has been forged. No public mandate has been restored. And so, for now, all three forces—BNP, NCP, and the army—continue to push from different ends of a triangle that may soon collapse under its own demands.