Are we witnessing a new political order in Pakistan?
For those watching the country, Pakistan is a changed place. It has a dramatically different political landscape from barely a month ago. The power structure has changed hands: Five new governments have been sworn in, one national and four provincial. General elections have brought a new party to power, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Its charismatic leader, Imran Khan — also wildly popular among the 7 million non-resident Pakistanis in the Gulf, Europe and America — is the country’s new prime minister.
The elections to the National Assembly and four provincial legislatures in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh have brought to the assemblies more than 1,000 legislators, over 60 percent of whom are new to national parliament and provincial legislatures. Of the five federal and provincial cabinets of about 100 ministers sworn in, more than half have never held this office before. Of the chief ministers of the four provinces, three are first-timers, of whom one — Sardar Usman Buzdar in Punjab — has not even been a legislator before. Khan himself is a first-time PM.
The “newness” of the political landscape doesn’t end with these holders of power, but also extends to the ranks of the political opposition. In fact, the latest elections have thrown up the fiercest opposition numbers in quantitative terms in the country’s history. In the National Assembly, there is a thin margin of only a few seats between the ranks of the ruling and opposition alliances. Both have nearly trebled their numbers from the last assembly.
Whereas previously it was Khan’s PTI and Bilawal Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), plus some smaller parties, constituting the opposition, now it is the PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) that form the nucleus of the opposition. Both the PPP and PML-N are old hands at governance and it will not be plain sailing for PTI if these parties remain united in their mandate to torment the Khan government.
Even in the provinces, the opposition ranges from strong to formidable. In Punjab, the PML-N, which lost the province for the first time in a decade and only the second time in two decades, is only a few seats short of PTI’s first-time majority in a province other than Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In Sindh, where the PPP retained its simple majority and managed to secure a record third consecutive stint in power — the first time any party in Pakistan has managed to do this in any province — the PTI has improved its showing from just one seat in the previous assembly to 30, which is a formidable feat. While the margins of opposition in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces are comparatively small, they still constitute strong blocs with adequate muscle to put the governments under pressure.
Whereas previously it was Khan’s PTI and Bilawal Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), plus some smaller parties, constituting the opposition, now it is the PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) that form the nucleus of the opposition.
Adnan Rehmat
The whole 2018 election campaign was billed as a “movement for change,” with PTI’s slogan of “Naya (new) Pakistan” underpinning the fierce jockeying for electoral power and a national mandate to govern the country for five years. But, just a few weeks on, it is too early to assess whether this political landscape will also translate into a “new way” of politics, governance and social development. The PTI is now in power at the center and in three of the four provinces, including in a secondary position in the ruling alliance in Balochistan, so it is Khan’s party that carries the burden of “changing” Pakistan.
For now, the people are still coming to grips with the new faces, new parties and new governments. The PTI, meanwhile, has opted to encash the honeymoon period goodwill. Its prime minister, chief ministers and ministers are mostly out of the public eye, huddled and sweating in strategy and planning meetings, putting into effect the pre-election promise of “100 days of change.” They are aiming to draft new policies that will supposedly translate PTI’s ambitious manifesto to transform Pakistan from a troubled aid and loan-dependent country to economically viable sustainability, with social development and governance reforms at its heart.
Even as the country awaits the new policies with bated breath, the politics in the interim has not changed much in terms of reductionist, self-interested behaviors, even though how they are failing people’s expectations is new. The opposition parties have failed to put up a united front when nominating chief ministers, the speaker of the National Assembly, the prime minister and the president. If they had united behind their chosen candidates, the opposition could have almost derailed Khan’s eventual crowning and could certainly have won the positions of Punjab chief minister and the country’s presidency. In the end, they only put up disappointing fights.
What the people — and the media and the chatterati — can’t make out, for now, is whether the old ways of politics as performed by the new opposition, comprising the PPP and PML-N, is about pursuing the same old self-defeating strategies, or instead constitutes a new-found maturity to allow an unprecedented free hand to their new joint-nemesis, PTI, so that a new way of politics becomes part of the “new Pakistan.” Doubts will give way to certainties and the answers will come soon enough.
• Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science. Twitter: @adnanrehmat1
