The BNP has collected two nomination papers from the Election Commission for the presidency, prompting curiosity in political circles. Election Commission sources said multiple nomination papers may be submitted for the same person and a candidate is valid if any one is accepted.
The BNP candidate will be known at the last moment, with a decision expected Thursday. Several senior party sources said party secretary general and local government, rural development and cooperatives minister Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir has been finalised as the likely candidate. With the BNP holding a parliamentary majority, its candidate is expected to become the 23rd president.
A responsible BNP leader said the standing committee had assigned the chairman responsibility for nominating the presidential candidate, so the party would make no advance announcement. The candidate will be known when nominations are filed on Thursday, August 13.
Under the Election Commission schedule, nominations may be filed from 10am to 4pm on August 13 and voting will take place on Thursday, August 20.
The 11-party alliance led by Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, the main opposition in parliament, has announced Liberal Democratic Party chairman Colonel (retd) Oli Ahmed as its candidate.
Unless something unusual happens, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir is considered virtually certain to be the BNP candidate. Senior sources told the media two days earlier that party chairman and Prime Minister Tarique Rahman had finalised his nomination. Sources also said Fakhrul signed the required consent statement last Saturday.
The presidency became vacant after Md Sahabuddin resigned on July 24. Speaker Hafiz Uddin Ahmed has served as acting president since then.
BNP sources said the last presidential election was held in 1991, 35 years ago, when Fakhrul contested from Thakurgaon-1. The August 20 vote is expected to centre on him.
Fakhrul became president of the BNP’s Thakurgaon district unit in 1992 and also served as vice-president of the Jatiyatabadi Krishak Dal. He lost BNP nominations from Thakurgaon-1 in the 1991 and 1996 parliamentary elections but won the seat in 2001 against Awami League’s Ramesh Chandra Sen and entered parliament for the first time. He later served in Khaleda Zia’s cabinet, first as state minister for agriculture and then as state minister for civil aviation and tourism until October 2006. The One-Eleven government found no corruption allegation against him despite investigating him, the report says.
He lost the 2008 election to Ramesh Chandra Sen but continued building his political profile. He became BNP senior joint secretary general at the party’s fifth national council in December 2009 and acting secretary general after Khandaker Delwar Hossain died on March 20, 2011. He was elected secretary general at the sixth national council on March 19, 2016, and remains in the post.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report