On February 8, the Pakistani electorate will elect a leader to manage one of the country’s worst economic crises, a developing terrorist challenge that has recently stoked tensions with Afghanistan and Iran, and a long-running border standoff with India. . Following Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ban and behind-the-scenes military maneuvers, foreign observers say the elections will be free or fair.
Three primary candidates have announced their intention to run in the parliamentary elections in hopes of leading the next government coalition as prime minister. However, two of them are eligible.
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The front-runner, Sharif, is a three-time former prime minister who recently returned from exile in the United Kingdom, where he fled in 2019 after squandering Pakistan’s influential military and facing corruption charges. The experts, added Daniel Markey, a senior adviser to the U. S. Institute of Peace and a former member of the CFR, say Sharif has since re-established ties with the military and is now acting as a proxy. Sharif is running on the list of a party he founded, the center-right. Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz.
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The son and grandson of former Pakistani ministers, Bhutto is the candidate of the center-left Pakistan People’s Party.
Imran Khan Khan is by far the most popular politician in Pakistan and was the last elected prime minister, but he will not be elected in February’s elections. His tenure ended in a no-confidence vote after he wasted the military in 2022 and was arrested. and sentenced to criminal punishment for corruption, a move his aides say is politically motivated. The Islamabad Election Commission has banned Khan and many other candidates from his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party from political life.
The elections are taking place against a backdrop of a worsening economic crisis and a deteriorating security situation. Over the past two years, the Pakistani rupee has fallen to an all-time low; inflation has soared as the costs of food, fuel, and medicine have skyrocketed; foreign exchange reserves have declined; the country has failed on several occasions; floods have caused tens of billions of dollars worth of damage; and power outages caused significant disruptions. As prime minister, Khan spoke out against an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan program that Pakistan had joined in 2019, and subsequent efforts to return to it were accompanied by drastic austerity measures.
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Meanwhile, Pakistan’s largely ungoverned western border regions are again amid fears of destabilizing conflict. Terrorist attacks killed more than 1,500 people in 2023, the deadliest year in terms of terrorism-related deaths in the country since 2016. Tensions with Afghanistan over its suspected terrorist groups led the Pakistani government to order the deportation of nearly two million Afghan migrants by the end of 2023. In January 2024, Tehran bombed what it said were separatist militants in Pakistan, and Islamabad responded by bombing its own separatist targets in Iran — the first airstrikes on Iranian soil in just four decades.
These threats could redraw attention to the military’s kingmaking role in elections. The army is the country’s most popular institution, consistently polling far above politicians, courts, and the electoral commission. Khan has sought to change this balance of power, including by stirring protests against the military’s influence in politics. If Khan succeeds in challenging the military, there is a possibility that “the whole system comes tumbling down, and it becomes a revolutionary moment,” Markey says.
Experts say that’s unlikely. According to Freedom House, the body that monitors global democracy, the electoral process in Pakistan is “partly free. “Although it holds normal elections, the country operates under a “hybrid regime” between the military and the civilian government, and no elected prime minister has served a term. full term.
The conversion remedy of Khan and Sharif is a case in point. In 2018, the military apparatus forcibly brought Khan in, accusing Sharif and his allies of election rigging and corruption; now Sharif is back in his grace and Khan has been disqualified. The Supreme Court overturned a lifetime ban on those convicted of criminal offences from running for office, paving the way for Sharif’s candidacy, while the government discovered a variety of procedural means to obstruct the PTI’s crusade and stifle any pro-Khan organisation.
At the same time, there is still the option of the election being delayed for the third time from the original date of November 2023. “The feeling in Pakistan is that elections will be held once the status quo has finished marginalizing Khan. and we can be sure that the elections will produce the desired outcome, namely a Sharif victory,” writes Madiha Afzal, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Pakistan has been the top recipient of U. S. aid for much of the 21st century, against the backdrop of the war in Afghanistan, but tensions have risen because of what Washington saw as Islamabad’s lack of initiative in the face of militant teams in the war. Relations deteriorated further under Khan as he criticized the United States and tried to forge closer ties with China. Pakistan has also recently distanced itself from President Joe Biden’s efforts to promote democracy globally. Some experts say Washington has made the decision to take a comfortable stance on Islamabad’s election issues. , in contrast to his assertive stance in the recent elections in Bangladesh, to avoid a deeper political crisis.
Decades of tensions between the two nuclear powers threatened to spill over into the 2019 cross-border conflicts over Kashmir. But India will also hold general elections this year, and some analysts say that under the Sharif administration, a new term for outgoing Prime Minister Narendra Modi may allow for a normalization of relations.
China. Beijing has become one of Islamabad’s most important allies, providing military assistance and billions of dollars of investment through China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) global infrastructure push. Some BRI projects, such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, have slowed and even stalled in recent years, but analysts say that a new Sharif government could put these projects back on track and potentially accelerate cooperation with Beijing.
Will Merrow and Michael Bricknell created the graphics for this In Brief.