Shehbaz Sharif’s PLM-N Appointed as Prime Minister: a Delay for a Most Popular Prime Minister

At a news conference with Zardari and other politicians, Shebaz Sharif did not say who would be the joint choice for prime minister, though it is widely believed that Sharif would head the new government. In his brief remarks, Sharif said that the talks on a coalition were successful.

The meeting was attended by the Pakistan People’s Party of former President Asif Ali Zardari and by the Pakistan Muslim League, which replaced the ousted prime minister, Khan.

A spokesperson for the Pakistan Muslim League, Marriyum Aurangzeb, said that the elder Sharif — a three-time prime minister — had nominated his younger brother for the prime minister role.

The decision to reappoint Shehbaz Sharif as prime minister is likely to be seen as a blow by millions of voters who cast their votes for independents last week. His party alleges that widespread irregularities occurred to prevent them from clearing a majority in parliament. Sharif’s party, known as the PLM-N, received the largest number of votes in the Feb. 8 elections, with 79 seats of a contested 264.

The surprisingly strong showing for Khan’s party were a shock for former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who was marked out as the powerful security establishment’s preferred candidate following his smooth return to the country last October.

The Election Commission stripped Khan’s party of its electoral symbol because it helped uneducated voters find candidates on the ballot. Other legal barriers were also imposed by them.

The Unprecedented State of Pakistan: The Elections of Prime Minister Imran Khan and the PLMN, a Time-Series Analysis

The inauguration of the National Assembly will be held before February 29th according to the constitution. The new prime minister will be chosen by the parliament.

“They have captured an entire generation,” Waraich says. As the demographic shift happens, the trend grows stronger in Imran Khan’s favor. The trend is greater urbanization with more young people.

Pakistan is a rapidly growing country of some 240 million people, who have a median age of 22 years old, and it appears that young Pakistanis skew toward Khan and his party. The director of a think tank says there are many new voters every five years because of the country’s demographic makeup. And overwhelmingly, they are voting for Khan.

There is a party that thinks that the coalition government formed by the twoparties will not last long. The aide to the Khan family says that we need to sit and watch the show. Everything will go into turmoil again in 18 months, and then Imran Khan will be, once again, top.

By that time, several Khan-backed independents reported that the initial number of votes they had received had somehow been scaled back, allowing their rivals to win. By Monday, the PTI’s media team reported more than 100 candidates they backed were appealing their results.

Since the elections, Khan supporters have gathered to protest in different parts of the country, sometimes clashing with police. Mostly though, the demonstrations have been small-scale and muted.

Sharif’s party, the PLMN, angrily responded to claims of vote rigging on X. “PTI’s definition of “free and fair elections” is where they win. If PML-N wins, then it’s rigging!”

“We could afford delay, but terrorist attacks, we could not,” Kakar said, referring to bombing attacks that killed more than 25 people the day before elections.

Source: Pakistan party nominates Shehbaz Sharif as prime minister, ending deadlock

A journalist’s perspective on an inconsistency of the free and fair election network: “I am afraid I can’t do this”

On Monday the Free and Fair Election Network, a Pakistani network that monitors elections, said their observers were not allowed “to observe the tabulation process” in 135 of 260 constituencies. In 65 of the 243 constituencies the officer in charge did not allow party agents to observe the counting process. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Pakistani foreign ministry pushed back against allegations of inconsistencies, describing the vote as “free and enthusiastic.”

The State Department called for investigations into claims of interference of fraud. That was echoed by the United Kingdom and the European Union.

The form shared by Sharif’s team, however, listed more votes received than voters, while 14 independents had not received any votes at all, meaning they did not even vote for themselves. This is not a true result. Somebody screwed up even in the basics of how to cheat,” says Musharraf Zaidi, a columnist and founder of an Islamabad-based think tank, Tabadlab. “They didn’t even vote for themselves. Their sons and daughters and mothers and wives didn’t vote for them, literally zero votes,” he says. It’s so obvious that it’s clumsy and incompetent.

But a document his party shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, to show that he had won, suggested discrepancies. The official paper shows how many votes a candidate received in their constituency.

Despite Pakistani elections being a massive undertaking of some 60 million voters casting ballots in more than 90,000 polling stations, the results are typically reported within hours of the vote concluding. This time, it took the election commission more than two days to issue most results.

On the day of elections, authorities temporarily shut down disrupted mobile networks, citing security concerns. The Khan supporters reported that electoral officials in some seats threw out the party representatives who were supposed to oversee vote counting.

Khan’s party, known as PTI, developed an AI-generated persona of Khan that repeatedly urged supporters to go to the polls and help residents familiarize themselves with the independents running in his name. “People are waiting for a glimpse of their leader,” says a senior aide, explaining why Khan’s team created an artificial intelligence persona while he was behind bars. “We can pass messages through to lawyers, they can come out, give press conferences. But Imran has a distinctive voice. He has a distinctive character, he has a distinctive look.”

It was a shocking outcome for the party that had faced months of suppression since Khan fell out with the military and was deposed from power nearly two years ago. The government intensified their investigation after Khan was arrested in May last year, an act that resulted in his supporters to overrun some military installations, a once unthinkable incident in a country where generals have ruled for half of Pakistan’s independence.

Some independent analysts concur. “If this had been a free and fair election from the outset, then their victory would have been pretty overwhelming,” says Omar Waraich, an analyst and former Pakistan correspondent for Time. “That’s the interesting thing,” he says. This election was not free and fair. And yet they won. That doesn’t usually happen. Usually when we speak of something not being not being a free and fair election, people have lost.”

“Pakistan’s diverse polity and pluralism will be well-represented by a unified government of all democratic forces imbibed with national purpose,” he said.

Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, appeared to approve those coalition building efforts, saying in a speech earlier on Sunday that the country needed “stable hands and a healing touch to move on from the politics of anarchy and polarization.”

The military will be the main source of survival for the government that has questionable legitimacy, says Zahid Hussain, an author and columnist.

Shehbaz will lead a coalition government of junior parties that excludes independents backed by his rival Imran Khan – who does not want to ally with his rivals. The coalition will have a comfortable majority.

He was in the job for 14 months before a government was put in place. He was seen as weak, powerless, and unable to contain his ministers as Pakistan’s economy teetered on the verge of collapse. Importantly though, he was seen as pliant to the demands of the army.

As the chief minister of Pakistan’s most populous province, Punjab, Shehbaz served as a no-drama technocrat. In April 2022. he became the new prime minister after his predecessor, Mr. Khan, was ousted from the post in a no-confidence vote.