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.”

Yunus, for his part, has used his Nobel bully pulpit to gently goad his country’s leaders to behave better. Engage in a marathon negotiating session, he has urged; work out a deal; exploit the euphoria his award has created. His name has even been floated as a substitute caretaker. He has expressed no enthusiasm for the job.

Since the announcement last Friday of the Nobel, which Yunus shares with his Grameen Bank, songs have been written in his honour. Banners and posters have gone up all over Dhaka, the capital. So many bouquets and wreaths have been dispatched to Grameen headquarters that it is a wonder there are any flowers left in Bangladesh.

Again and again, people here describe the Nobel as a prize second only to the country’s freedom from Pakistan in 1971.

To recognise Grameen, of course, is to recognise how such nongovernmental organizations—Bangladesh seems to have more than its share— have stepped in to do a great many things that would normally be expected from government: building schools, offering health care and creating economic opportunities for the poorest in a country that is among the poorest in the world.

Instead, political deadlock has carried the day, pitting the country’s two most powerful women against each other, and the legacies of their respective families.

Prime Minister Khaleda Zia rose to power after the assassination of her husband, Gen Ziaur Rahman, the country’s military ruler, in 1981. The opposition leader, Sheik Hasina Wazed, is the daughter of the founding prime minister, Sheik Mujibur Rahman.

Yunus has called Bangladeshi politics “a bottleneck” to the country’s aspirations. “There’s no ideological fight between them,” Yunus said of the leaders in an interview here this week. “They go back to what your husband did, what your father did. They have to fight because they came into politics because of their legacy. There’s no substance in the politics.”

“Why don’t you just sit down and settle the whole thing?” Yunus wondered aloud.