WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson’s ability to carry out President Trump’s “play call” for funding the government will be put to the test on Tuesday as the House votes on a bill to end the partial shutdown.
Johnson will need near-unanimous support from his Republican conference to proceed to a final vote, but he and other GOP leaders sounded confident during a Tuesday morning press conference that they will succeed. Johnson can afford to lose only one Republican on party line votes with perfect attendance, but some lawmakers had threatened to tank the effort if their priorities are not included. Trump weighed in with a social media post, telling them, “There can be NO CHANGES at this time.”
“We will work together in good faith to address the issues that have been raised, but we cannot have another long, pointless, and destructive Shutdown that will hurt our Country so badly — One that will not benefit Republicans or Democrats. I hope everyone will vote, YES!,” Trump wrote on his social media site.
The measure would end the partial government shutdown that began Saturday, funding most of the federal government through Sept. 30 and the Department of Homeland Security for two weeks as lawmakers negotiate potential changes for the agency that enforces the nation’s immigration laws — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
“The Republicans are going to do the responsible thing,” Johnson said.
Running Trump’s ‘play call’
The House had previously approved a final package of spending bills for this fiscal year ending Sept. 30, but the Senate broke up that package so that more negotiations could take place for the Homeland Security funding bill. Democrats are demanding changes in response to events in Minneapolis, where two American citizens were shot and killed by federal agents.
Johnson said on Fox News Channel’s “Fox News Sunday” it was Trump’s “play call to do it this way. He had already conceded he wants to turn down the volume, so to speak.” But GOP leaders sounded as if they still had work to do in convincing the rank-and-file to join them as House lawmakers returned to the Capitol on Monday after a week back in their congressional districts.
“We always work till the midnight hour to get the votes,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La. “You never start the process with everybody on board. You work through it, and you could say that about every major bill we’ve passed.”
The funding package passed the Senate on Friday. Trump says he’ll sign it immediately if it passes the House. Some Democrats are expected to vote for the final bill but not for the initial procedural measure setting the terms for the House debate, making it the tougher test for Johnson and the White House.
Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has made clear that Democrats wouldn’t help Republicans out of their procedural jam, even though Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer helped negotiate the funding bill.
Jeffries, of New York, noted that the procedural vote covers a variety of issues that most Democrats oppose, including resolutions to hold former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.
“If they have some massive mandate,” Jeffries said of Republicans, “then go pass your rule, which includes toxic bills that we don’t support.”
Key differences from the last shutdown
The path to the current partial shutdown differs from the fall impasse, which affected more agencies and lasted a record 43 days.
Then, the debate was over extending temporary coronavirus pandemic-era subsidies for those who get health coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Democrats were unsuccessful in getting those subsidies included as part of a package to end the shutdown.
Congress has made important progress since then, passing six of the 12 annual appropriations bills that fund federal agencies and programs. That includes important programs such as nutrition assistance and fully operating national parks and historic sites. They are funded through Sept. 30.
But the remaining unpassed bills represent roughly three-quarters of federal spending, including the Defense Department. Service members and federal workers could miss paychecks depending upon the length of the current funding lapse.
Voting bill becomes last-minute obstacle
Some House Republicans have demanded that the funding package include legislation requiring voters to show proof of citizenship before they are eligible to participate in elections. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., had said the legislation, known as the SAVE Act, must be included in the appropriations package.
But Luna appeared to drop her objections late Monday, writing on social media that she had spoken with Trump about a “pathway forward” for the voting bill in the Senate that would keep the government open. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., met with Trump at the White House.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank focused on democracy and voting rights issues, said the voting bill’s passage would mean that Americans would need to produce a passport or birth certificate to register to vote and that at least 21 million voters lack ready access to those papers.
“If House Republicans add the SAVE Act to the bipartisan appropriations package it will lead to another prolonged Trump government shutdown,” said Schumer, of New York. “Let’s be clear, the SAVE Act is not about securing our elections. It is about suppressing voters.”
Johnson, of Louisiana, has operated with a thin majority throughout his tenure as speaker. But with Saturday’s special election in Texas, the Republican majority stands at a threadbare 218-214, shrinking the GOP’s ability to withstand defections.
Freking writes for the Associated Press. AP video journalist Nathan Ellgren and writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Monday that the federal government should “nationalize” elections, repeating — without evidence — his long-running claim that U.S. elections are beset by widespread fraud.
Speaking on a podcast hosted by former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, Trump said Republicans should “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” alleging that voting irregularities in what he called “crooked states” are hurting the GOP.
“The Republican ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said.
The proposal would clash with the Constitution’s long-standing framework that grants states primary authority over election administration, and underscored Trump’s continued efforts to upend voting rules ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Trump, for example, lamented that Republicans have not been “tougher” on the issue, again asserting without evidence that he lost the 2020 election because undocumented immigrants voted illegally for Democrats.
“If we don’t get them out, Republicans will never win another election,” Trump said. “These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally, and it is amazing that the Republicans are not tougher on it.”
In his remarks, the president suggested that “some interesting things” may come out of Georgia in the near future. Trump did not divulge more details, but was probably teasing what may come after the FBI served a search warrant at the election headquarters of Fulton County, Ga.
Days after FBI agents descended on the election center, the New York Times reported that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was with agents at the scene when she called Trump on her cellphone. Trump thanked them for their work, according to the report, an unusual interaction between the president and investigators tied to a politically sensitive inquiry.
In the days leading up to the Georgia search, Trump suggested in a speech during the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, that criminal charges were imminent in connection to what he called a “rigged” 2020 election.
Georgia has been central to Trump’s 2020 claims. That’s where Trump called Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2021, asking him to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn the state’s results. Raffensperger refused, affirming that a series of reviews confirmed that Democrat Joe Biden had won the state.
Since returning to office a year ago, Trump has continued to aggressively pushed changes to election rules.
“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in October.
In Congress, several Republican lawmakers have backed legislation to require people provide proof of citizenship before they register to vote.
Some conservatives are using the elections bill as bargaining chip amid negotiations over a spending package that would end a partial government shutdown that began early Saturday.
“ONLY AMERICAN CITIZENS SHOULD BE VOTING IN AMERICAN ELECTIONS. This is common sense not rocket science,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) wrote on X on Monday as negotiations were continuing.
Right-wing candidate from the governing PPSO leads presidential race with 53.01 percent of the vote, early results show.
Published On 2 Feb 20262 Feb 2026
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The right-wing law-and-order candidate, Laura Fernandez, has taken a commanding lead in Costa Rica’s presidential election, according to early results.
With ballots from 31 percent of polling stations counted late on Sunday, Fernandez, of the governing Sovereign People Party (PPSO), had 53.01 percent of the vote, the results showed.
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Alvaro Ramos of the centre-left National Liberation Party was in second place with 30.05 percent, while former First Lady Claudia Dobles was in third place with 3.9 percent.
Fernandez needs at least 40 percent to win the election outright and avoid a run-off on April 5.
The 39-year-old politician is the handpicked successor of incumbent President Rodrigo Chaves, and campaigned on continuing his tough security policies.
The historically peaceful Central American nation’s crime surge in recent years could be a deciding factor for many voters. Some fault Chaves’s presidency for failing to bring the rates down, but many see his confrontational style as the best chance for Costa Rica to tame the violence.
Fernandez was previously Chaves’s minister of national planning and economic policy and, more recently, his minister of the presidency.
Costa Ricans also voted for the 57-seat National Assembly. Chaves’s party is expected to make gains, but perhaps not achieve the supermajority he and Fernandez have called for, which would allow their party to choose Supreme Court magistrates, for example.
Twenty contenders were seeking the presidency, but no candidate other than Fernandez and Ramos reached 5 percent in the preliminary and partial results.
HOUSTON — Democrat Christian Menefee won a Texas U.S. House seat in a Saturday special election that will further narrow Republicans’ slim majority.
Menefee, the Harris County attorney, prevailed in a runoff against fellow Democrat Amanda Edwards, a former Houston City Council member. He will replace the late Rep. Sylvester Turner, a former Houston mayor, who died in March 2025.
The seat representing the heavily Democratic Houston-based district has been vacant for nearly a year.
Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott didn’t schedule the first round of voting until November. Menefee and Edwards were the top vote-getters in a 16-candidate, all-parties primary. They advanced to a runoff because no candidate won a majority of the vote.
Abbott argued that Houston officials needed the six months between Turner’s death and the first round of voting to prepare for the special election, but Democrats criticized the long wait as a move designed to give the GOP a slightly bigger cushion in the House for difficult votes. The 18th District is safely Democratic with minority residents making up most of the voters.
Menefee, 37, was endorsed by several prominent Texas Democrats including former presidential candidate and congressman Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Jasmine Crockett. He was joined Saturday by Crockett, who is running for the U.S. Senate.
“I”m looking to bring a fight to Washington, D.C., and I need your help to do it,” he said as he stood beside Crockett in a social media video.
Menefee ousted an incumbent in 2020 to become Harris County’s first Black county attorney, representing it in civil cases, and he has joined legal challenges of President Trump’s executive orders on immigration.
Edwards served four years on the Houston City Council starting in 2016. She ran for U.S. Senate in 2020 but finished fifth in a 12-person primary. She unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in the 2024 primary, and when Lee died that July, local Democrats narrowly nominated Turner over Edwards as Lee’s replacement.
Menefee finished ahead of Edwards in the primary, but Edwards picked up the endorsement of the third-place finisher, state Rep. Jolanda Jones, who said Edwards had skills “best suited to go against Trump.”
After Saturday, yet another election lies ahead in little over a month. Menefee and Edwards are on the ballot again on March 3, when they will face Democratic Rep. Al Green in another election — this one a Democratic primary in a newly drawn 18th Congressional District, for the full term that starts in 2027.
GOP lawmakers who control Texas state government drew a new map last summer for this year’s midterms, pushed by Trump to create five more winnable seats for Republicans to help preserve their majority.
Winter weather added to voters’ confusion, forcing local officials to cancel two days of advance voting this week, prompting civil rights group to go to court to win a two-day extension, into Thursday.
Kim Sang-hwan (2-L), chief justice of the Constitutional Court, and the court’s other justices attend a hearing to deliver a verdict on the impeachment of former police chief Cho Ji-ho at the court in Seoul, South Korea, 18 December 2025. The court upheld Cho’s impeachment over his involvement in former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s short-lived imposition of martial law. File. Photo by YONHAP / EPA
Jan. 30 (Asia Today) — South Korea’s Innovation Party said Thursday that the Constitutional Court’s decision striking down the 3% vote threshold for proportional representation is a warning to the country’s two major parties and called on the Democratic Party to amend the Public Official Election Act.
The party argued that the ruling requires broader electoral reform, including abolishing two-member local council districts, expanding regional proportional representation and introducing runoff voting for mayors and governors.
Park Byeong-won, interim spokesperson for the Innovation Party, told a news conference at the National Assembly Communication Center that the court’s decision underscored violations of popular sovereignty. He said the Democratic Party, which holds a majority in the National Assembly, should take responsibility for revising the election law.
Park said the court found partially unconstitutional a provision of the Public Official Election Act that denied proportional representation seats to parties that failed to secure at least 3% of the nationwide vote. As a result, he said, parties receiving less than 3% support will be eligible for seat allocation in the 2028 general election without further legislation.
He added that the court criticized the current system as favoring the two major parties and blocking new political forces from entering the National Assembly. Park said it would be unrealistic to expect the major parties to voluntarily reform a system that benefits them and called the ruling a rebuke that lawmakers must heed.
Park said the decision highlighted the need to abolish two-member local council districts, expand regional proportional representation and introduce runoff voting for local chief executives in upcoming local elections. He said the Democratic Party should move unilaterally to amend the election law to reflect the principle of popular sovereignty.
On Wednesday, the Constitutional Court ruled 7-2 that Article 189(1) of the Public Official Election Act was unconstitutional. The provision limited proportional representation seats to parties that won at least 3% of the national vote or secured five constituency seats.
Minor parties and candidates who failed to meet the threshold in the 21st and 22nd general elections under a semi-linked proportional representation system had filed the constitutional complaint.
DENVER — Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection in 2020. But for more than five years, he’s been trying to convince Americans the opposite is true by falsely saying the election was marred by widespread fraud.
Now that he’s president again, Trump is pushing the federal government to back up those bogus claims.
On Wednesday, the FBI served a search warrant at the election headquarters of Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, seeking ballots from the 2020 election. That follows Trump’s comments earlier this month when he suggested during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that charges related to the election were imminent.
“The man has obsessions, as do a fair number of people, but he’s the only one who has the full power of the United States behind him,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor.
Hasen and many others noted that Trump’s use of the FBI to pursue his obsession with the 2020 election is part of a pattern of the president transforming the federal government into his personal tool of vengeance.
Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, compared the search to the Minnesota immigration crackdown that has killed two U.S. citizen protesters, launched by Trump as his latest blow against the state’s governor, who ran against him as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in 2024.
“From Minnesota to Georgia, on display to the whole world, is a President spiraling out of control, wielding federal law enforcement as an unaccountable instrument of personal power and revenge,” Ossoff said in a statement.
It also comes as election officials across the country are starting to rev up for the 2026 midterms, where Trump is struggling to help his party maintain its control of Congress. Noting that, in 2020, Trump contemplated using the military to seize voting machines after his loss, some worry he’s laying the groundwork for a similar maneuver in the fall.
“Georgia’s a blueprint,” said Kristin Nabers of the left-leaning group All Voting Is Local. “If they can get away with taking election materials here, what’s to stop them from taking election materials or machines from some other state after they lose?”
Georgia has been at the heart of Trump’s 2020 obsession. He infamously called Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, asking that Raffensperger “find” 11,780 more votes for Trump so he could be declared the winner of the state. Raffensperger refused, noting that repeated reviews confirmed Democrat Joe Biden had narrowly won Georgia.
Those were part of a series of reviews in battleground states, often led by Republicans, that affirmed Biden’s win, including in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump also lost dozens of court cases challenging the election results and his own attorney general at the time said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
His allies who repeated his lies have been successfully sued for defamation. That includes former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who settled with two Georgia election workers after a court ruled he owed them $148 million for defaming them after the 2020 election.
Voting machine companies also have brought defamation cases against some conservative-leaning news sites that aired unsubstantiated claims about their equipment being linked to fraud in 2020. Fox News settled one such case by agreeing to pay $787 million after the judge ruled it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations were true.
Trump’s campaign to move Georgia into his column also sparked an ill-fated attempt to prosecute him and some of his allies by Fulton County District Atty. Fani Willis, a Democrat. The case collapsed after Willis was removed over conflict-of-interest concerns, and Trump has since sought damages from the office.
On his first day in office, Trump rewarded some of those who helped him try to overturn the 2020 election results by pardoning, commuting or vowing to dismiss the cases of about 1,500 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He later signed an executive order trying to set new rules for state election systems and voting procedures, although that has been repeatedly blocked by judges who have ruled that the Constitution gives states, and in some instances Congress, control of elections rather than the president.
As part of his campaign of retribution, Trump also has spoken about wanting to criminally charge lawmakers who sat on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, suggesting protective pardons of them from Biden are legally invalid. He’s targeted a former cybersecurity appointee who assured the public in 2020 that the election was secure.
During a year of presidential duties, from dealing with wars in Gaza and Ukraine to shepherding sweeping tax and spending legislation through Congress, Trump has reliably found time to turn the subject to 2020. He has falsely called the election rigged, said Democrats cheated and even installed a White House plaque claiming Biden took office after “the most corrupt election ever.”
David Becker, a former Department of Justice voting rights attorney and executive director of The Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he was skeptical the FBI search in Georgia would lead to any successful prosecutions. Trump has demanded charges against several enemies such as former FBI Director James Comey and New York’s Democratic Atty. Gen., Letitia James, that have stalled in court.
“So much this administration has done is to make claims in social media rather than go to court,” Becker said. “I suspect this is more about poisoning the well for 2026.”
In Dhaka’s political chatter, one word often keeps resurfacing when people debate who really holds the reins of the country: “Kochukhet”.
The neighbourhood that houses key military installations has, in recent public discussions, become shorthand for the cantonment’s influence over civilian matters, including politics.
Bangladesh is weeks away from a national election on February 12, the first since the 2024 uprising that ended then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s long rule and ushered in an interim administration led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.
The army is not vying for electoral power. But it has become central to the voting climate as the most visible guarantor of public order, with the police still weakened in morale and capacity after the upheaval of 2024, and with the country still reckoning with a “security apparatus” that watchdogs and official inquiries say was used to shape political outcomes under Hasina.
For nearly a year and a half now, soldiers have policed the streets of Bangladesh, operating under an order that grants them magisterial powers in support of law and order. On election duty, the deployment will scale up further: Officials have said as many as 100,000 troops are expected nationwide, and proposed changes to election rules would formally list the armed forces among the poll’s “law-enforcing agencies”.
Bangladesh, a nation of more than 170 million wedged between India and Myanmar, has repeatedly seen political transitions hijacked by coups, counter-coups and military rule, a past that still shapes how Bangladeshis read the present. Analysts say that the army today is not positioned for an overt takeover, but it remains a decisive power centre: an institution embedded across the state, able to narrow civilian choices through its security role, intelligence networks and footprint inside government.
Bangladesh’s Chief of Army Staff General Waker-uz-Zaman, seen here during an interview with Reuters at his office in the Bangladesh Army Headquarters, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, September 23, 2024 [Mohammad Ponir Hossain/ Reuters]
The military’s role now
Thomas Kean, the International Crisis Group’s senior consultant on Bangladesh and Myanmar, said the army has been “backstopping the interim government” not only politically but also “through day-to-day security amid police weakness”.
He said the institution is eager to see a transition to an elected government so the country returns to a firmer constitutional footing and so troops can “return to their barracks”.
“There are different factions and views within the army, but overall I would say that the army wants to see the election take place as smoothly as possible,” Kean told Al Jazeera.
Kean argued that if the army chief, General Waker-uz-Zaman, and the military “had wanted to take power, they could have done so when the political order collapsed on August 5”, the day Hasina fled to India amid a popular student-led revolt. But the military chose not to, he said, in part because it had learned from the fallout of past experiments with its direct political control.
Asif Shahan, a political analyst and professor at Dhaka University, said the military was aware that a takeover would have also jeopardised key interests, including Bangladesh’s United Nations peacekeeping deployments, which carry both financial benefits and reputational weight for the armed forces. Bangladesh has for decades been one of the biggest suppliers to UN peacekeeping missions, and receives between $100m and $500m a year in payouts and equipment reimbursements for these services.
But Shahan argues that the military remains “an important political actor”. Today, he said, its influence is “less about overt intervention than the institutional weight it carries through the security and intelligence apparatus”.
He also pointed to what he called the army’s “corporate” footprint. That footprint spans involvement in major state infrastructure projects, the military’s own business conglomerate, and the presence of serving and retired officers across commercial and state bodies.
Shahan said the last Hasina government “gave them a share of the pie”, leaving “a kind of culture of corruption … ingrained”. He suggested that this could translate into informal pressure on whoever governs next to do the same, and anxieties inside the force over whether “the facilities and privileges” it has accumulated will shrink.
On the election itself, Shahan too said that the possibility of the army trying to gain overt control was “very low” unless there is such a major law and order breakdown that there is public demand for the army to step in as the “only source of stability”,
Others who track the military closely agreed. Rajib Hossain, a former army officer and author of the best-selling book Commando, said he “strongly believes” the army will avoid partisan involvement for its own sake. “The army will play a neutral role during this election,” he said. “What we’ve observed on the ground over the past year and a half, there is no record of the army acting in a partisan way.”
But, he added, pressure on the institution has been intense since 2024. “Internally, there’s an understanding that if the army fails to act neutrally, it could lose even the public credibility it still has,” he said.
Mustafa Kamal Rusho, a retired brigadier general at the Osmani Centre for Peace and Security Studies, also told Al Jazeera that the military does not have “any clear intent” to influence politics, though “it still remains a critical power base”.
That leverage was clearest during the 2024 uprising, Rusho said, when Bangladesh’s political crisis reached a point that many Bangladeshis and international watchdogs viewed the military’s posture as decisive. “If the military did not take the stand that it took, then there would have been more bloodshed,” he said.
With protests escalating, the military refused to fully enforce Hasina’s curfew orders and decided troops would not fire on civilians. It enabled Hasina to flee to India on an air force plane, and the army chief then announced an interim government would be formed.
In an Al Jazeera documentary on the uprising last year, Waker-uz-Zaman, who is related to Hasina and was appointed less than two months before her collapse, also stressed that his forces would not turn their guns on civilians. “We don’t shoot at civilians. It’s not in our culture … So we did not intervene,” he said.
In the same interview, he added: “We believe that the military should not engage in politics … It’s not our cup of tea.”
Bangladesh’s military leader and president, Hussain Muhammad Ershad, meeting British PM Thatcher at Downing St. London on February 16, 1989 [Wendy Schwegmann/ Reuters]
When the military ruled
That hasn’t always been the military’s position.
After the 1975 assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding leader and then-president, by a group of military officers, the country entered a period marked by coups, counter-coups and military rule upheavals that reshaped the state and produced political forces that still dominate elections.
One of them was the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), founded by army general-turned-ruler Ziaur Rahman, who emerged as the country’s most powerful figure in the late 1970s before moving into civilian politics. Rahman was assassinated in 1981 in a failed coup attempt by another group of military officers. The BNP remains a key contender in the February 12 vote, now led by Rahman’s son, Tarique Rahman, who has returned to front-line politics after a long exile.
In 1982, then army chief Hussain Muhammad Ershad seized power and ruled for much of the 1980s. Writer and political historian Mohiuddin Ahmed has described Ershad’s takeover as coming only months after he publicly argued that “the army should be brought in to help run the country”.
Eventually, a pro-democracy movement led by Zia’s wife, Khaleda Zia, and Hasina, also Mujibur Rahman’s daughter, forced him from office. The BNP won a landmark election, and in 1991, Khaleda became the country’s first female prime minister.
Since then, Rusho said, the military’s influence “became more indirect”, though Bangladesh still saw an abortive May 1996 showdown when the then army chief, Lieutenant General Abu Saleh Mohammad Nasim, defied presidential orders, and troops loyal to him moved towards Dhaka. Nasim was arrested and removed from office.
A decade later, in 2007, the military in effect “fully backed” a caretaker government that was formed to replace Khaleda’s second administration, which had ruled between 2001 and 2006. That caretaker government was installed in January 2007 after a breakdown in the election process and escalating political violence. The International Crisis Group described the caretaker administration as “headed by technocrats but controlled by the military”, while then-army chief Moeen U Ahmed argued the political climate “was deteriorating very rapidly” and that the military’s intervention had “quickly ended” street violence.
It was only after 2009, when Hasina came back to power – her Awami League had first ruled between 1996 and 2001 – that the military became “subordinate to the civilian regime”, Rusho said.
Bangladeshi military force soldiers on armored vehicles patrol the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Saturday, July 20, 2024 [Rajib Dhar/ AP Photo]
Blurred lines
But even though the military today insists that it does not want power, it has often drifted into the political terrain.
A major moment arrived just weeks after Hasina’s ouster, in September 2024, when General Zaman told the Reuters news agency he would back Yunus’s interim government “come what may”, while also floating a timeline for elections within 18 months. The interview, which critics described as something unprecedented for a serving army chief, placed the military close to the country’s central political debate.
Hossain, the former army officer and author, criticised the public nature of the intervention. “If he [Zaman] had discussed this after sitting with all the stakeholders … the interim [administration], political parties, protest leaders … and then gone to the media, that would be acceptable,” he said. “But here, he declared it unilaterally and blindsided the government from his position of power. He had no authority to do that.”
“You may say this is an extraordinary, transitional time and the military has a role to play,” Hossain added. “But then, why do we have an administration at all?”
Shahan, the Dhaka University professor, said Zaman “came very close” to crossing the line and explained it as a product of military institutional culture after August 5. “Military organisations … like to follow standing operating procedures, order, stability,” he said. But August 5, he added, was “a political rupture” that forced the army and the nation into uncertainty: about the interim government’s longevity, legitimacy and how it would deal with the military.
Those anxieties, Shahan said, likely pushed Zaman to speak. In principle, he said, it is reasonable for the army chief to say elections are needed for stability. But “when he set a specific timeline – within 18 months – that is beyond his role”, Shahan said. “It then appears as if he is dictating.”
Shahan added that the problem becomes sharper when that kind of specificity appears to respond to a party demand; he was referring to a time when only the Bangladesh Nationalist Party was repeatedly pushing for a vote timetable.
Eight months later, in May 2025, Zaman again weighed in, telling a high-level military gathering, according to local media reports, that his position had not changed and that the next national vote should be held by December 2025. After that, Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb, a special adviser to Yunus, wrote on Facebook that “the army can’t meddle in politics” and argued that the military chief had failed to maintain “jurisdictional correctness” by prescribing an election deadline.
Military personnel stand in front of a portrait of then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on July 30, 2024 [Rajib Dhar/ AP Photo]
The shadow Hasina left
Another reason that analysts say the military’s role is being debated so intensely now is because of Bangladesh’s recent wounds.
During Hasina’s 15-year rule, human rights organisations argued Bangladesh’s security apparatus was often used for political control. Human Rights Watch has described enforced disappearances as a “hallmark” of Hasina’s rule since 2009.
When the United States sanctioned the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) in 2021 over allegations of extrajudicial killings, the US Department of the Treasury said, “These incidents target opposition party members, journalists, and human rights activists.” Critics argue that security institutions became central to governance, and questions about how that machinery was used are now part of the post-Hasina political settlement.
Hossain, the former officer, said the Hasina-era legacy still echoes inside the top brass. “If you look at the leadership, the general, five lieutenant generals, and some major generals and brigadier generals, a lot of them were part of Hasina’s apparatus,” he said, “aside from a handful of professional officers”.
A report by Bangladesh’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances says disappearances were used as a “tool for political repression” and that the practice “reached alarming levels during key political flashpoints”, including in the run-up to elections in 2014, 2018 and 2024. The commission said it verified 1,569 cases of enforced disappearance.
In cases where political affiliation could be confirmed, the Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing accounted for about 75 percent of victims, while the BNP and its affiliated groups accounted for about 22 percent. Among those “still missing or dead”, the BNP and its allies accounted for about 68 percent, while the Jamaat and its affiliates accounted for about 22 percent, the report said.
The commission also noted that the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), the military-run intelligence agency, had been “accused of manipulating domestic politics and interfering in the 2014 parliamentary elections”, and argued that perceived alignment with the Awami League compromised its neutrality.
Several senior military officers, including 15 in service, are now facing trial in a civilian tribunal on charges of enforced disappearances, murders and custodial tortures.
The proceedings have become a delicate issue in civil-military relations, as cases against serving officers in civilian courts are rare in Bangladesh’s history.
Former army chief Iqbal Karim Bhuiyan wrote on Facebook that local media had reported disagreements over the “trial process” for officers accused of crimes against humanity and that those disagreements had created what he described as a “chasm” between the interim government and the army’s top leadership.
Hossain, the former officer, however, said he disagreed. “These trials are not defaming the army,” Hossain said. “Rather, they are a kind of redemption for the institution to recover from the stigma created by the crimes of some self-serving officers.”
He argued that accountability could motivate younger officers and reduce the risk of the military being politically exploited again. Rusho, the retired brigadier general, also argued that politicisation under Hasina was driven less by formal doctrine than by executive control over careers.
“Promotions, important postings, placements … they were influenced considerably by the executive branch,” he said. “When you influence postings, some people’s loyalty often gets diverted to political masters, [and] it affects … professionalism and capability.”
Kean of the International Crisis Group said the real test for Bangladesh now would be whether it can stop the security state from being reabsorbed into partisan politics.
“The military is going to remain a powerful institution in Bangladesh, with a level of influence in domestic politics,” he said. “One hopes that the lesson of the past 18 months is that the military is better to support civilian administrations rather than be in power directly – that it can be a stabilising force, and one that is ultimately committed to democracy and civilian leadership.”
But, he added, the onus to do that isn’t only on the generals. Civilian politicians, too, needed to resist the temptation to misuse the military. That alone, he suggested, would help Bangladesh keep the army in the barracks and politicians accountable to the people, not to men in khakis.
FBI searches Fulton County election office in Georgia over 2020 election concerns linked to Trump-Biden contest.
Published On 28 Jan 202628 Jan 2026
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The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is executing a search warrant at a Fulton County election office in Georgia related to the 2020 United States election, an agency spokesperson said.
An FBI spokesperson said agents were “executing a court-authorised law enforcement action” at the county’s main election office in Union City, just south of Atlanta. The spokesperson declined to provide any further information, citing an ongoing matter.
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FBI agents were spotted entering the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, said Fox News, which first reported the search of a new facility that state officials opened in 2023.
The probe concerns the 2020 election, in which Republican Donald Trump, the current US president, lost to the former US president, Democrat Joe Biden, the official said.
The search comes as the FBI, under the leadership of Director Kash Patel, has moved quickly to pursue the political grievances of Trump, including by working with the Justice Department to investigate multiple perceived adversaries of the commander-in-chief.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment.
Find the votes
Trump has long insisted that the 2020 election was stolen even though judges across the country and his own attorney general said they found no evidence of widespread fraud that tipped the contest in Biden’s favour.
Representatives for Fulton County’s election office referred queries to the county’s external affairs office, which did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
The Democratic-leaning county, home to Atlanta, backed Biden by a wide margin in the 2020 election, helping him win the state and the presidency.
Trump unsuccessfully sought to overturn the result, pressuring the state’s top election official to “find” him enough votes to claim victory.
Earlier this month, Trump asked a state court for $6.2m in legal fees, saying he spent it fighting criminal charges of election interference filed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
In August 2023, Willis obtained an indictment against Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
That case was dismissed in November after courts barred Willis and her office from pursuing it because of an “appearance of impropriety” stemming from a romantic relationship she had with a prosecutor she had appointed to lead the case.
UNION CITY, Ga. — FBI agents were executing a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office near Atlanta on Wednesday, an agency spokesperson confirmed.
An FBI spokesperson said agents were “executing a court authorized law enforcement action” at the county’s main election office in Union City, just south of Atlanta. The spokesperson declined to provide any further information, citing an ongoing matter.
The search comes as the FBI under the leadership of Director Kash Patel has moved quickly to pursue the political grievances of President Trump, including by working with the Justice Department to investigate multiple perceived adversaries of the Republican commander-in-chief.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment.
Trump has long insisted that the 2020 election was stolen even though judges across the country and his own attorney general said they found no evidence of widespread fault that tipped the contest in Democrat Joe Biden’s favor.
He has long made Georgia, one of the battleground states he lost in 2020, a central target for his complaints about the election and memorably pleaded with its then-secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the contest.
Last week, in reference to the 2020 election, he asserted that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.” It was not clear what in particular he was referring to.
Fulton County District Atty. Fani Willis in August 2023 obtained an indictment against Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. That case was dismissed in November after courts barred Willis and her office from pursuing it because of an “appearance of impropriety” stemming from a romantic relationship she had with a prosecutor she had appointed to lead the case.
Laura Fernández Delgado, candidate of the ruling Partido Pueblo Soberano, is leading in polls one week out from Costa Rica’s elections. File Photo by Jeffrey Arguedas/EPA
Jan. 26 (UPI) — With one week to go before presidential elections scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 1, Costa Rica closed its campaign season amid a polarized political climate and with the ruling party leading most opinion polls.
In recent weeks, multiple surveys have shown Laura Fernández Delgado, candidate of the ruling Partido Pueblo Soberano, holding first place with support levels close to 40%. That figure would be enough for the former cabinet minister to secure a first-round victory.
However, polls also point to high voter indecision, estimated at around 45%, in a context marked by political fragmentation and an unusually large field of candidates, local newspaper El Observador reported.
A recent survey by the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Políticos (CIEP) of the Universidad de Costa Rica places Fernández at 30% support, still well ahead of the remaining 19 candidates competing for the presidency.
Second place is held by Álvaro Ramos of the Partido Liberación Nacional, who polls below 8%. Most other candidates register less than 2.3% support.
Fernández, 39, has campaigned on a continuity platform, seeking to capitalize on the popularity of President Rodrigo Chaves, who is expected to leave office with approval ratings near 60%. His support has been driven in part by a confrontational style and rhetoric against traditional politics and established elites.
Chaves, who is constitutionally barred from seeking re-election, has governed amid persistent political tension and frequent institutional clashes. His administration has been characterized by sharp rhetoric, public disputes with other branches of government and a governing style that emphasizes direct communication and political confrontation.
The elections follow a dispute with the Tribunal Supremo Electoral, which in October 2025 asked the Legislative Assembly to lift the president’s immunity to investigate alleged violations of electoral rules, including his participation in campaign activities.
Public security has emerged as one of the dominant themes throughout the campaign, reflecting growing concern among voters over rising violent crime and the expanding influence of organized crime in several regions of the country, according to daily La Nación.
During debates organized by media outlets and universities, candidates broadly agreed that addressing insecurity requires more than law enforcement alone. Proposals have emphasized criminal intelligence, increased police presence, improved coordination among state institutions and the recovery of territories affected by organized crime.
According to CIEP, two out of three Costa Ricans believe the country’s security situation is worse than a year ago. Long viewed as one of Central America’s safest nations, Costa Rica is facing an unprecedented security crisis.
Organized crime, fueled largely by drug trafficking, has expanded its presence in neighborhoods in southern San Jose, as well as in the provinces of Limón and Puntarenas. In 2024, Costa Rica recorded a homicide rate of 16.6 per 100,000 inhabitants, ranking eighth highest in Latin America, surpassing Guatemala and approaching levels reported in Mexico.
