In Pakistan, crisis looms after election few believe was free or fair
The party with the most votes is banned and its leader in prison
February 9, 2024 — Pakistan’s politicians are again steering the country into political and constitutional crisis following an inconclusive election that has ended with no clear winner after tens of millions of men and women defied military manipulation, extremist intimidation, ballot stuffing, vote rigging, violence, a telecomms blackout, and the jailing of the most popular candidate, to send an unequivocal message that they’re done with politics as usual.
Rival party leaders claimed victory, complaints of irregularities poured in to election authorities, and the United States led international expressions of concern about the integrity of the voting process. The backroom players of Pakistan’s political casino reverted to type as the clock started ticking: they have 72 hours from the declaration of results at midday on Sunday to finalise the deals that will decide the makeup of the next government.
The man who would likely have won a free and fair election to become Pakistan’s next prime minister, the former prime minister Imran Khan, sits in prison, barred from standing after convictions on corruption and other charges. With his party, Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) effectively banned, candidates loyal to Khan stood as independents and swept the poll. Of the 265 seats contested, 101 were secured by independents; media reported that 93 of those were PTI-backed candidates.
Party figures said PTI would have won enough to secure the majority 169 needed to form government, had the contest been held on a level playing field. Now, said Raoof Hassan, a PTI spokesman, “there is a fight we have to fight, we will fight a legal battle to retake our seats”. He told Foreign Policy the party plans to “approach the court” to make a case that the loyal independents “be allowed to join our party”.
Party leaders demanded the release of “political prisoners,” referring to Khan and other PTI members imprisoned in an Army crackdown aimed at destroying it as a viable participant in the election. Analysts said that Khan’s freedom will be the least of the PTI’s demands as it becomes pivotal in forming the country’s next government.
“The fact of the matter is that if Imran Khan is approached, he will have to be released first, and he will certainly demand the restoration of his party,” said Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, a former Pakistan ambassador to the United States, China and Russia. “He will demand that as a condition of talking to any of the other parties. He will demand a forensic examination of all the results, which will give him a landslide.”
About 47 percent of Pakistan’s 128 million eligible voters turned out on February 8th. Some observers hailed a victory for democracy, in a country where people have become accustomed to their votes counting for little more than window dressing. Throughout Pakistan’s short history, power has been held by civilians approved by the military, or by the military itself.
“The people have spoken,” Qasi said. He referred to “massive interference before, during and after polling” and called the election “anything but fair”. Despite the fraud, he said, “it was a landslide in favour of Imran Khan and PTI.”
The scale of support for Khan and the PTI has shaken the main rivals, both scions of dynastic political families that have traded power with the military since Pakistan was founded in 1947: Nawaz Sharif, of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, which secured 75 seats, and Bilawal Zardari Bhutto, of the Pakistan People’s Party, with 54 seats.
Sharif, 74, has been prime minister three times already and is widely believed to be favoured by the powerful Army, which is blamed for the widespread attempts to rig the result in his favor. His brother, Shehbaz, took over as prime minister after Khan was sacked in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April, 2022. Bhutto, 35, is the son of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated as she made a comeback in 2007, and the grandson of former president and prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was jailed and then executed in 1979.
As the PML-N and PPP leadership began their outreach to potential coalition partners, analysts suggested that Khan’s party could merge with one of the smaller parties, giving it access to a proportion of the 70 National Assembly seats that are reserved for women and minorities. In this way, PTI could gain the numbers to that would jettison the party into an unassailably powerful position.
These numerical machinations, however, ignore the reality that Pakistan is ruled by a military establishment that does not want Khan or the PTI in parliament. There’s a dangerous game afoot, said independent journalist Asad Toor, noting the military’s history of dispensing with problem politicians. “The military will have to decide what to do,” he said. “A coup would at least make clear who they are and how they play.”
The military leadership may yet have heeded the message of the ballot box. The Chief of the Army Staff, Gen. Asim Munir, issued a conciliatory statement on Saturday, as the stalled counting process sparked alarm about the obvious fraud, saying the country needed stability and “a healing touch to move on from the politics of anarchy and polarisation”.
Khan became prime minister in 2018 with the Army’s support but “power went to his head” as he came to believe he was bigger than the institution he owed his position to, said former lawmaker and political analyst, Affrasiab Khattack. His biggest mistake came when he tried to block Munir’s appointment as head of the Army. Khan lost the battle, and the two men went to war.
Khan, a former cricket star in a cricket-mad country, played on the Army’s unpopularity to boost his own approval, especially among Pakistani youth. The median age of Pakistan’s 220 million people is 20.6 years old; 44 percent of eligible voters are aged 18 to 35 years old. They have grown up amid grinding economic crisis, expanding poverty, double-digit inflation, scant job prospects, and worsening state indebtedness to international lending institutions and bilateral partners like China and Saudi Arabia.
His growing popularity only further enraged the military. His arrest on May 9th last year on corruption charges sparked protests by supporters who attacked military installations and the homes of senior officers—crossing a red line for the Army. The ensuing crackdown on Khan and the PTI was swift and brutal, but only further boosted Khan’s standing, especially among youth, women and the poor, Qasi said.
Now comes the real test of Khan’s political acuity. His achievements as prime minister from 2018 to 2022 were minimal to negative. Lack of economic growth was accompanied by worsening human and women’s rights, alienation from the United States, and media repression.
Toor, the journalist, said PTI’s election success was “not a vote based on performance,” rather than “a vote based on revenge” against military state capture. People used the ballot box to express their deep dislike of the prevailing power structure and sorry prospects for stability and prosperity.
Both the Army and PTI will need to learn lessons from the past few years-- and Khan and Munir will need to set aside hostilities--if Pakistan is to emerge from the current crises that hamper stability, progress and development. For Khan, however, the stakes are higher and failure could be fatal.
“If he makes a deal in which he is the junior partner, again, of the established power structure, he will disappoint his people and they will desert him,” said Qasi, the former diplomat, adding that this applied also to the independent candidates who are now vulnerable to better offers.
“Imran Khan will have to do a serious review of his first innings, and do much better in his second innings,” said Qasi, using a cricketing analogy. “He is committed, he is strong, he is by far the best prosect for the country. But if he does not do better, then he will lose all the support that he has gained.”