The timing, Bangladeshis confess, could not have been better. With a troubled election season around the corner, the Nobel Peace Prize comes to Bangladesh as it braces for battle with itself. Or as Muhammad Habibur Rahman, a retired chief justice, put it, “The country is in such doldrums, it’s a shot in the arm.”

This densely populated, grindingly poor country of 147 million people is frequently troubled by doldrums, natural and political. The latest is an impasse between the main political parties over who will take over at the end of next week, when the current Bangladesh National Party-led administration is to hand power to a caretaker government.

So bitter are the politics here that the law requires a caretaker to organise elections. The high-stakes haggling over who that should be this year has added to the usual level of distrust in a country where the widespread perception of corruption and the rivalry between the ruling party and the opposition have induced a long bout of political paralysis.

The opposition has threatened to boycott the elections, scheduled for early 2007. Its loyalists have clashed repeatedly with the police. Talks to resolve the standoff have proved futile.

But now there is the “Yunus effect,” as some call it, named for Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit pioneer of Bangladesh and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Yunus has inspired jubilation amid the gloom. Shegufta Yasmeen, who waited to greet him one morning this week holding white gladioli, said he was “like the light of the moon in a dark room.”

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