Pakistan People's Party and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz will form a coalition with Shehbaz Sharif selected as prime ministerial candidate.
Two of Pakistan's main political parties have reached a formal agreement to form a coalition government, they say, days after an inconclusive national election failed to produce a clear majority.
The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) now have the “necessary numbers” to form a government, PMLN president and former prime minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Tuesday.
Sitting next to Sharif at a news conference in Islamabad, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, former foreign minister and PPP chairman, confirmed that Sharif would be his coalition's candidate for prime minister.
He added that his father, Asif Ali Zardari, would be the alliance's presidential candidate.
Sharif, younger brother of another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, said the PMLN-PPP coalition also had the support of other smaller parties.
The announcement comes after 10 days of intense negotiations following the February 8 elections, which resulted in a National Assembly without consensus when no party obtained the 134 seats necessary for a simple majority and to form a government on its own.
Independent candidates aligned with another major political party – imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) – won the most seats at 93, but they did not have the numbers or a political party or coalition to support them. allowed them to govern.
Candidates aligned with the PTI were forced to run as independents due to state restrictions against the party.
The PMLN is the largest party with 79 seats, and the PPP is second with 54. It along with four other smaller parties has a comfortable majority in the 264-seat legislature.
electoral fraud
Responding to the two parties' announcement, the PTI, which had also been trying to form coalitions with smaller parties, called its rivals “mandate thieves” in a post on social media platform X.
PDM 2.0 = #MandateThieves pic.twitter.com/9ukk4oJZvF
-PTI (@PTIofficial) February 20, 2024
The PTI has alleged that there was widespread voter fraud in the elections, a claim that was apparently backed up when a senior bureaucrat on Saturday admitted his role in changing the election results.
The PTI faced severe repression by government agencies and security forces in the weeks leading up to the elections.
In January, the party was even denied the use of its electoral symbol, the cricket bat, resulting in its candidates running as independents rather than members of the party itself.
Meanwhile, social media platform
“X has been inaccessible in Pakistan [since Saturday] because the public uses it to protest,” Usama Khilji, a digital rights activist, told the Agence France-Presse news agency. However, Pakistan's government has not acknowledged the disruption.
The delay in forming a government in Pakistan – a nuclear-armed nation of 241 million – has caused concern as the country faces an economic crisis amid slow growth, record inflation and increasing violence by of armed groups. You need stable management with the authority to make difficult decisions.
Bhutto Zardari said on Tuesday that the PPP and PMLN would push to form a government as soon as possible.
According to the country's constitution, a session of parliament must be convened before February 29, after which a vote will be held to elect a new prime minister.
