Demonstrations, Protests and Riots

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      Protesters at the Louvre Hurl Soup at the Mona Lisa

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      Two women from an environmental group threw pumpkin-colored soup at the artwork, which is behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre and did not appear to sustain damage.Two protesters from an environmental group hurled pumpkin-colored soup on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, splashing the bulletproof glass that protects the most famous painting in the world, but not apparently damaging the work itself.As the customary crowd around the 16th-century painting by Leonardo da Vinci gasped in shock, the protesters, two young women, followed up their attack by passing under a barrier and standing on either side of the artwork, hands raised in an apparent salute.“What is more important? Art or the right to have a healthy and sustainable food system?” the activists said, speaking in French. “Our agricultural system is sick.” They were led away by Louvre security guards.It was not immediately clear how the women got the soup through the elaborate security system at the museum, which borders the Seine and contains a vast art and archaeological collection spanning civilizations and centuries.One of the women removed her jacket to reveal the words Riposte Alimentaire, or Food Response, on a white T-shirt. Riposte Alimentaire is part of a coalition of protest groups known as the A22 movement. They include Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, the group that poured tomato soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London in 2022.The attack on the Mona Lisa came as French farmers have blocked roads, including approaches to Paris, in recent days to protest low wages and what they see as excessive regulation. Many new regulations in France reflect the attempt to forge a green, carbon-free European economy, an objective that the farmers consider too expensive and burdensome in the near term.The protests by the two young women and the farmers appeared to reflect two starkly different views of agriculture and the appropriate priorities for European society.Staff at the Louvre on Sunday tried to erect cloth screens to conceal the soup-splashed Mona Lisa, but the screens were not effective. Images of the attack quickly went viral on social media.The Mona Lisa has been behind glass since the 1950s, when a visitor poured acid on it. In 2019, the museum installed glass of what it said was superior transparency. Three years later, another environmental activist threw cake and cream at the painting. It was undamaged.The latest attack will heighten security concerns ahead of the Paris Olympics.The opening ceremony is just six months away and will take place on the Seine. A flotilla of boats will carry about 10,000 athletes to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, as nearly a half-million spectators, including many heads of state, line the four-mile route. The boats will sail past the Louvre as part of a ceremony conceived to showcase the beauty of Paris, but which has raised serious security issues that are still under review. More

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      Indigenous Australians Plan to Go Bigger on Australia Day

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      “Invasion Day is the reason why we’re all here today, but we must go beyond that,” one activist said.The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a reporter based in the Northern Territory.Parades, Union Jack themed barbecues, angry protests, and reflective vigils — it’s 2024, and Jan. 26 in Australia remains a day that inspires many different reactions across the nation.Formally Australia Day but also known as Invasion Day or Survival Day, the date marks the violent arrival of British settlers to the continent in 1788, and it has a long history as a political flashpoint for Indigenous affairs.This year, a First Nations advocacy group in Darwin decided to go bigger — with a hybrid protest for Indigenous Australians, Palestinians and the people of West Papua, which was annexed by Indonesia decades ago, leading to a prolonged conflict.“Yes, Invasion Day is the reason why we’re all here today, but we must go beyond that,” said Mililma May, who runs the group, a nonprofit called Uprising of the People.Ms. May, a Kulumbirigin Danggalaba Tiwi woman, said that what was needed for all groups were practical and tangible ways to understand colonialism. By bringing separate protest movements together with a common goal “to demand land back,” she said she hoped Jan. 26 would unify oppressed groups and appeal to a broader cross-section of Australians.It’s also an effort meant to bring attention back to unresolved issues.In the months after the failure of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum — devised to enshrine an Indigenous advisory group in the Australian Constitution — First Nations issues have dropped off the mainstream news agenda and slid down the government’s to-do list.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Proud Boys Member Who Threatened Police With Ax Handle on Jan. 6 Is Sentenced

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      William Chrestman of Olathe, Kan., a Proud Boys member, was sentenced to 55 months for breaching the U.S. Capitol and threatening officers, prosecutors said.A member of the Proud Boys extremist group who threatened police officers with an ax handle and breached the U.S. Capitol during the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced on Friday to nearly five years in prison, federal prosecutors said.Judge Timothy J. Kelly of U.S. District Court in Washington sentenced the man, William Chrestman, 51, of Olathe, Kan., to 55 months in prison. Mr. Chrestman pleaded guilty in October to felony charges of obstruction of an official proceeding and threatening a federal officer.The judge also ordered Mr. Chrestman to pay $2,000 in restitution, and his prison sentence will be followed by three years of supervised release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said in a statement on Friday.Mr. Chrestman was sentenced to less time in prison than the 63 months that prosecutors had recommended in a sentencing memo. They argued that Mr. Chrestman had “played a significant role during the riot due to his presence and conduct at pivotal moments during the day.”Lawyers for Mr. Chrestman did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday. Prosecutors declined to comment.Mr. Chrestman has been in jail since he was arrested in February 2021, and he will get credit for time served, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.The Jan. 6 Riot Inquiry So Far: Three Years, Hundreds of Prison SentencesMore than 1,200 people have now been arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol, and more than 450 sentenced to periods of incarceration. The investigation is far from over.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Why Jan. 6 Wasn’t an Insurrection

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      I’ve written several times about the case for disqualifying Donald Trump via the 14th Amendment, arguing that it fails tests of political prudence and constitutional plausibility alike. But the debate keeps going, and the proponents of disqualification have dug into the position that whatever the prudential concerns about the amendment’s application, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, obviously amounted to an insurrection in the sense intended by the Constitution, and saying otherwise is just evasion or denial.From their vantage point, any definition of “insurrection” that limits the amendment’s application to the kind of broad political-military rebellion that occasioned its original passage — to the hypothetical raising of a Trumpist Army of Northern Virginia, say, or the seizure of the U.S. Capitol by a Confederate States of Trumpist America — is an abuse of the natural meaning of the word. Such a limitation, they say, ignores all the obvious ways that lesser, less comprehensive forms of resistance to lawful authority clearly qualify as insurrectionary.Here are a couple of examples of this argument: The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, arguing with me and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait; and the constitutional law professor Ilya Somin, going back and forth with his fellow legal scholar Steven Calabresi in Reason magazine.I have a basic sympathy with Calabresi’s suggestion that the “paradigmatic example” that the drafters of the 14th Amendment had in mind should guide our understanding of its ambiguities, and since the paradigmatic example is the Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, a five-hour riot probably doesn’t clear the bar. (For related arguments about the perils of applying precedents from specific crises to radically different situations, see this essay from Samuel Issacharoff as well.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Greatest Threat Posed by Trump

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      If Donald Trump storms through Iowa and easily seizes the G.O.P. nomination, as presumed, and then goes on to win back the presidency, his victory will trigger a wild political and legal melee. The primary motivating purpose of his campaign is vengeance. He’s told his base that he is their retribution and has promised to “totally obliterate” the deep state. If he faces protests, he may immediately invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy troops, under his command, to American cities.Although we experienced a related melee during his first term, a second would be substantially worse. Instead of offering an internally divided administration, in which a variety of responsible aides and appointees struggled to contain Trump’s worst impulses, a second term would present him in his purest form. His MAGA base would replace the Federalist Society as the screener of his judicial appointments, and there are now a sufficient number of pure Trump sycophants to staff his White House from top to bottom.I dread the division and conflict of a second Trump term, and I don’t minimize the possibility of Trump doing permanent political damage to the Republic. But the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.To put the matter as simply as possible: Eight years of bitter experience have taught us that supporting Trump degrades the character of his core supporters. There are still millions of reluctant Trump voters, people who’ve retained their kindness, integrity and good sense even as they cast a ballot for the past and almost certainly future G.O.P. nominee. I have friends and family members who vote for Trump, and I love them dearly. But the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.Already we can see the changes in individual character. In December, I wrote about the moral devolution of Rudy Giuliani and of the other MAGA men and women who have populated the highest echelons of the Trump movement. But what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.You can go to social gatherings here in the South and hear people whisper to friends, “Don’t talk about politics in front of Dad. He’s out of control.” I know that rage and conspiracies aren’t unique to the right. During my litigation career, I frequently faced off against the worst excesses of the radical left. But never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Taiwan Democracy Is Loud and Proud

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      Huang Chen-yu strode onto an outdoor stage in a southern Taiwanese county, whooping and hollering as she roused the crowd of 20,000 into a joyous frenzy — to welcome a succession of politicians in matching jackets.Taiwan is in the final days of its presidential election contest, and the big campaign rallies, with M.C.s like Ms. Huang, are boisterous, flashy spectacles — as if a variety show and a disco crashed into a candidate’s town hall meeting.At the high point of the rally, the Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, Lai Ching-te, was introduced to the crowd in Chiayi, a county in southern Taiwan. Ms. Huang roared in Taiwanese, “Frozen garlic!”The phrase “dongsuan” sounds like “get elected” and, yes, also like “frozen garlic.” Ms. Huang and another M.C. led the crowd of supporters, now on their feet, in a rapid-fire, call-and-response chant: “Lai Ching-te! Frozen garlic! Lai Ching-te! Frozen garlic!” Then they sped up: “Lai Ching-te! Lai Ching-te! Lai Ching-te! Frozen garlic! Frozen garlic! Frozen garlic!”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Bangladesh Votes in Election Marred by Crackdown and Boycotts

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      With the opposition in jail or off the ballots, the prime minister for the past 15 years is expected to maintain her grip on power in what appeared to be a low-turnout vote.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh was nearly guaranteed a fourth consecutive term in office as voting ended on Sunday in a low-turnout election that has been marred by a widespread crackdown on the opposition.Security remained tight across the country of 170 million people as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main opposition, which has boycotted the election as unfair, pushed for a nationwide strike. The situation had remained tense in the days leading up to the vote, with episodes of violence — including arson on a train in Dhaka that killed four people, and the torching of more than a dozen polling stations — reported from across the country.Ms. Hasina, 76, who cast her vote in Dhaka, the capital, soon after polls opened at 8 a.m. local time, urged people to come out in large numbers.On the campaign trail, she has called for political stability and continuity, often by mentioning the country’s violent history of coups and counter-coups, including one that killed her father, Bangladesh’s founding leader, in the 1970s. She has highlighted her efforts to champion economic development, and her secular party’s resistance to the rise of Islamist militancy, as reasons the voters should and will give her another term.“We have struggled a lot for this voting right: jail, oppression, grenades, bombs,” Ms. Hasina told reporters after casting her vote. “This election will be free and fair.”Police officers patrolling in Dhaka on Sunday, as security remained tight across the country.Monirul Alam/EPA, via ShutterstockBut with the results foretold, and the election largely a one-sided affair, there appeared to be little excitement on the streets about the vote.“I didn’t go to vote in my hometown because what difference would my vote make?” said Mominul Islam, a rickshaw puller in Dhaka.Visits to polling centers in Dhaka showed voting was slow. Members of the governing party, the Awami League, milled around outside the voting centers, but voters merely trickled in. Local news media reported instances of the governing party members lining up their supporters when cameras and foreign election observers reached a polling station, only for the people to disperse afterward.At 3 p.m. local time, voter turnout stood around 27 percent, Kazi Habibul Awal, Bangladesh’s chief election commissioner, told reporters. After the polls closed an hour later, Mr. Awal said at a news conference that “we can assure that at least 40 percent of the votes were cast” and that the exact turnout would be clearer after counting ended.With the main opposition boycotting, the competition — still tense, and in many constituencies marked by violence — is largely between members of Ms. Hasina’s own party.While Ms. Hasina’s officials tried to play down the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s boycott of the vote, pointing to smaller parties still participating, her moves in the final stretch of the campaign made clear that she was worried about the vote’s legitimacy. She instructed her party to prop up what became known as dummy candidates — members of the Awami League contesting as independent candidates against their own party’s official candidates.It was an effort to not only create a semblance of a contest, but to also shore up voter turnout that could give the election some legitimacy, analysts said.But with power so centralized, and so much economic and political fortune at stake in a ticket to Parliament, the result has been bitter interparty fights in many of the constituencies, including violent clashes. In at least two constituencies, Awami League candidates have pointed fingers at opponents from their own party for deaths of their supporters.Voters at a polling center on Sunday in Dhaka.Monirul Alam/EPA, via Shutterstock“The ruling party had been trying for a long time to break up the main opposition party, the B.N.P., and bring some of their people to their side. This would have shown that there was some kind of participation from different parties, especially the B.N.P., in the election,” said Ali Riaz, a political scientist and professor at Illinois State University, using an abbreviation for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. “When they were not very successful in this, they had to choose this path.”Mr. Riaz said the way that the election had played out made clear that Bangladesh was no longer “an effective multiparty system.”“I am saying effective because there may be offices with signboards, but there will be no effective opposition,” Mr. Riaz said. “Not on paper, but in practice Bangladesh will become a one-party state.”After winning a competitive election held under a neutral caretaker government in 2009, Ms. Hasina has set out to turn Bangladesh into a one-party state, analysts and critics say. She changed the Constitution to make illegal the practice of holding elections under neutral administration, and won two additional terms — in 2014 and 2018 — in votes marked by opposition boycotts and irregularities.Ms. Hasina first moved to crush the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, effectively banning its political work and prosecuting several of its senior leaders for violence and treason during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971. More recently, her efforts have focused on the B.N.P., the main opposition party, which has by now been so gutted that it retains little mobilizing capacity. Its leaders who are not already in jail are bogged down with endless court appointments.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh on her way on Sunday to cast her vote in Dhaka. She is nearly guaranteed a fourth consecutive term in office.Altaf Qadri/Associated PressDuring much of the past 15 years, Ms. Hasina’s second time in power after a five-year term ending in 2001, an economic success story took attention away from her autocratic turn.On the back of investments in the garment industry, Bangladesh experienced such impressive growth that average income levels at one point surpassed India’s. The country also saw major improvements in education, health, female participation in the labor force and preparedness against climate disasters.She has also played a difficult balancing act in a tough neighborhood, where both China and India are vying for influence. Ms. Hasina has managed to keep India and China on her side.As Western pressures increased on her government over human rights abuses, including the crackdown on opposition and the enforced disappearances by Bangladesh’s elite security agencies, both Beijing and New Delhi have come to her defense. India, in particular, has been using its growing diplomatic weight to urge the United States and other Western nations to take it easy on Ms. Hasina, diplomats in New Delhi and Dhaka said.As Ms. Hasina prepared to seek a fourth consecutive term, the sheen was coming off the economic success story, with the population struggling with rising prices. While she might be able to control a decimated opposition through her control of security agencies and the judiciary, the task will become much more difficult if public anger continues over rising prices and she fails to check the economy’s downward spiral.Counting votes after the polls closed on Sunday in Munshiganj, outside Dhaka.Altaf Qadri/Associated PressThe successive blows of the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which pushed up fuel and food prices, have exposed Bangladesh’s overreliance on one industry. The country’s foreign reserves have been shrinking, forcing it to seek emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund.Opposition leaders tried to leverage public anger over the economy, holding their first major rallies in years, prompting Ms. Hasina to intensify the crackdown. The B.N.P. says more than 20,000 of its members have been arrested since its last major rally in October, which faced police batons and tear gas.“They are playing with the ambition of the country to be a democratic state,” Nazrul Islam Khan, a leader of the B.N.P., said on the eve of the vote. “We will continue the movement until the government falls.” More

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      Election Will Further Test Bangladesh’s Ailing Democracy

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      Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is expected to roll to a fourth consecutive term as the gutted opposition boycotts what it calls an unfair election.There is little doubt that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will seize a fourth consecutive term when Bangladesh goes to the polls on Sunday. The bigger question is what will remain of the country’s democracy.The main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has been crushed and left with little mobilizing capacity. Its leaders who are not already in jail are bogged down with endless court appointments or are in hiding with the police on their tail. Ms. Hasina’s Awami League, in power since 2009, has cleared the way for a race so one-sided that the party urged its own contestants to prop up dummy candidates so it does not look as if they won unchallenged.The B.N.P. has boycotted the vote, after Ms. Hasina rejected its demand that she step aside during the campaign period so the election could be held under a neutral administration. Even as Bangladesh has appeared to be finding a path to prosperity and shedding a legacy of coups and assassinations, the uncontested election shows how politics in this country of 170 million remains hostage to decades of bad blood between the two major parties.The possibility of violence hangs in the air. The opposition’s effort to protest the vote, with repeated calls for nationwide strikes and civil disobedience, has been met with an intensified crackdown. More than 20,000 B.N.P. members and leaders have been arrested since the party’s last major rally, in October, according to party leaders and lawyers.Diplomats in Dhaka said they had received reports of appalling conditions inside overcrowded prisons. At least nine opposition leaders and members have died in jail since the Oct. 28 crackdown, according to human rights organizations and reports in local news media.As the B.N.P. has issued another call for a national strike, this one on the eve of the election, security has been increased, with the army deployed in the capital, Dhaka, and other regions.Bangladeshi soldiers were deployed on streets as part of enhanced security measures ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections.Mahmud Hossain Opu/Associated Press“There is a risk of increased violence after the polls, from both sides,” said Pierre Prakash, the Asia director for the International Crisis Group. “If the B.N.P. feels the largely nonviolent strategy it deployed in the run-up to the 2024 election has failed, leaders could come under pressure to revert to the more overt violence of the past.”And if the B.N.P. does resort to widespread violence, Mr. Prakash said, it will be walking right into a trap. Ms. Hasina’s party has been laying the groundwork for an even wider crackdown as it pushes a narrative that the opposition is filled with “terrorists” and “killers.”During Ms. Hasina’s 15-year rule, her second stint in power, the country has been a paradox of sorts.As investments in the garment export industry began paying off, the economy experienced such impressive growth that average income levels at one point surpassed India’s. Bangladesh has also shown major strides in other development areas, from education and health to female participation in the labor force and preparedness against climate disasters.But all along, critics say, Ms. Hasina, 76, has tried to turn the country into a one-party state. From the security agencies to the courts, she has captured government institutions and unleashed them onto anyone who does not fall in line.In the latest example, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus was given a six-month jail sentence in what he has described as a political vendetta. Mr. Yunus is out on bail and appealing the verdict in a case that government officials say is not political and involves violations of labor laws.Ms. Hasina’s drive to dismantle the B.N.P. often appears to be a personal campaign of vengeance.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina addressing a campaign rally in December.-/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor most of the time since Bangladesh’s creation in 1971 — when it separated from Pakistan after a bloody campaign of cultural oppression against Bengalis — the country has been ruled by the two parties.The Awami League was the party of Ms. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s independence leader and founding president. After he set out on a campaign to centralize power, he was killed in a military coup that also left much of his young family dead.The B.N.P. was formed by Gen. Ziaur Rahman, the army chief who rose to power after a bloody phase of coups and counter-coups in the wake of Sheikh Mujib’s assassination. Mr. Zia, as he was known, was also later killed in a military coup.While Ms. Hasina sees the B.N.P. as the creation of the same military cadre that protected her father’s killers, her drive to destroy the party is even more personal, her aides say. When the B.N.P., led by Mr. Zia’s widow, Khaleda Zia, was in power in the early 2000s, one of Ms. Hasina’s rallies as an opposition leader was attacked by dozens of grenades. She survived a close call, but more than 20 of her party’s leaders and supporters were killed.Over the past couple of years, Ms. Hasina’s crackdown has become particularly severe as the sheen from the story of economic progress has worn off.The successive blows of the pandemic and the Ukraine war, which pushed up fuel and food prices, have shrunk Bangladesh’s foreign reserves to dangerous lows. The crisis has exposed not only Bangladesh’s overreliance on the garment industry, but also what Western diplomats in Dhaka say are kleptocratic practices hidden beneath the country’s economic growth.The ruling elite, diplomats say, tap into banks and the nation’s riches with little accountability. With about 60 percent of Parliament made up of businesspeople, economic interests and political power have become deeply intertwined, impeding economic reform, analysts say.The opposition tried to capitalize on public anger over rising prices, holding its first large rallies in years. But its momentum was short-lived, as the government’s crackdown deepened.Supporters of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party in Dhaka in July.Atul Loke for The New York TimesThe B.N.P. says its demand for an election under a neutral caretaker was nothing new — Ms. Hasina called for the same when she was in the opposition, and she came to power in an election administered by a caretaker government. Bangladesh’s institutions are so vulnerable to abuse by the ruling party that no opposition has won election when the vote was not held under a caretaker.But Ms. Hasina considers the B.N.P.’s demand to be a violation of the constitution — because, after she came to power, she amended the charter to declare the practice illegal and a disruption to the democratic cycle.Seeking to avoid a repeat of the 2014 vote, in which Ms. Hasina’s party won more than half of the seats uncontested, the Awami League has been pointing to the smaller parties that are still contesting this year’s election. But analysts say the party has engineered a new token opposition. Some of these candidates made clear on campaign posters where they stood: “Supported by the Awami League.”The B.N.P.’s leader, Ms. Zia, a former prime minister, remains under house arrest. Her son, the party’s acting chairman, is in exile in London. Much of the party’s leadership is in jail.In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s vote, the party’s visibility was largely reduced to virtual news conferences by Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, one of the few senior B.N.P. leaders not in jail.Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, the senior joint secretary general of the B.N.P., in his party office in June. Atul Loke for The New York TimesMr. Rizvi himself faces 180 court cases, and for months at a time he remained locked up in his office, sleeping in a small corner bed, as he risked arrest if he ventured out. He walks with a cane because of a bullet wound he received while protesting a military dictator in the late 1980s.“We and other like-minded parties have boycotted this election,” Mr. Rizvi said in a virtual news conference on Thursday, announcing a new strike to begin on Saturday. “The political parties and the people of the country have already understood that this election is going to be a rehearsal of the anarchy of Awami League. It’s going to be a one-sided election.”Obaidul Quader, general secretary of the Awami League, said it regretted the main opposition’s absence.“Had B.N.P. been there,” he added, “the election would have been more competitive.” More