BUCHAREST/SOFIA: Blizzards swept parts of eastern Europe on Friday, closing roads and causing traffic accidents, travel delays and leading to medical evacuations.
In Romania, one of the worst affected areas, authorities said main highways in the south and east were made impassable due to the heavy snow. More than 40 trains were not running due to snow on the track.
Senior emergency situations official Raed Arafat said authorities evacuated 622 people who needed dialysis and 126 pregnant women.
In Bulgaria, snowstorms paralyzed traffic and cut electricity to hundreds of thousands of people while forcing atomic energy producer Nuclearelectrica in neighboring Romania to shut down its No. 1 reactor.
Blizzards caused power blackouts in more than 770 Bulgarian towns, authorities said. It also closed parts of the Trakiya motorway in southeastern Bulgaria, all roads in a swathe of the northeast and the main A-2 motorway linking the Romanian capital Bucharest with the Black Sea port of Constanta.
Serbia’s state television reported that 17 people, including six children, were injured in a pileup caused by the wintry weather on the outskirts of the southern city of Nis.
Heavy snow and strong winds disrupted traffic in southern Serbia and snow piled up to two-meters (6.6 feet) high, closing several roads. Local official Dragan Dimitrijevic said emergency crews were “helpless against the wind.”
“New piles form almost immediately after we clear up,” he said.
Temperatures are forecast to drop to minus 20 C (minus 4 F) at the weekend and Bulgarian authorities issued a severe weather warning for 20 out of the country’s 28 regions, telling people to stay indoors.
In Croatia, the temperatures dipped below freezing even along the country’s Adriatic coast where high winds halted some ferry traffic to the islands and over the bridges along the coastline.
In Montenegro, bad weather caused traffic delays and authorities urged people to stay indoors. Villages were virtually cut off in the worst-hit northern part of the country.
Elsewhere, temperatures in Germany plunged as low as minus 25 C (minus 13 F) overnight, after storm “Axel” sucked in icy air from the Arctic.
In northern Europe, which is accustomed to subzero temperatures, it was bitterly cold but sunny, plummeting to minus 23 C on Friday morning in Helsinki, Finland, the same temperature recorded in Latvia. Temperatures were forecast to plunge to minus 25 C in central Romania and minus 20 in Bulgaria.
Blizzards, icy weather grip parts of Europe
Blizzards, icy weather grip parts of Europe
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
