The hour of reckoning is here for PML-N
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Pakistan’s largest opposition party, the PML-N, is facing an existential dilemma. Even though they don’t admit it openly, an open fight has broken out between the two brothers that lead it – thrice former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and thrice former chief minister for Punjab Shahbaz Sharif – over the future course the party should take. The choice is stark: sustain confrontation with the powerful security establishment or pursue conciliation with it.
What will happen? That depends on how a few factors play out over the next few months, including whether Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party PTI manages to switch from a general state of drift in governing the country to use a slightly improving economy as a prop for the next election due in less than two years. Plus, the fact that the UK, where Nawaz has been in medical exile for almost two years, has ruled its unwillingness to allow him to stay any longer. He faces jail if he returns. Nawaz has challenged the UK decision in an immigration tribunal.
The PML-N has been in a bruising equation with the security establishment since Nawaz was forced out of the office of prime minister in 2017 under a controversial court verdict. Since then, Nawaz and his firebrand daughter have addressed dozens of political rallies for two years openly castigating the military for targeting them.
So, just when it seemed the PML-N couldn’t fare worse, the party losing power in two key regional elections in Gilgit-Baltistan (2020) and Pakistan-administered Kashmir this month where it was in power, has led to an indirect war of words between the Sharif brothers. This has shocked the party and is seen as a bad omen by the millions of party supporters 20 months before general elections.
A two-road PML-N will end up nowhere.
Adnan Rehmat
Shahbaz, the younger Sharif, and formally the party president, in an indirect criticism of the Nawaz-Maryam brand of incendiary politics, said in a primetime TV program a few days ago that the country needed ‘reconciliation’ and called for a ‘grand national dialogue’ to end political polarization.
This was widely seen as a signal that the PML-N was ready to mend fences and strengthen its chances in the 2023 general elections, allowing Shahbaz supporters to repeat his line.
Within two days, Nawaz, who holds no formal office in the party, shot back firing a series of tweets saying the party would not backtrack from its wildly popular “respect the vote” line. This has since generated a stunned silence but spread confusion in the second-tier party leadership and cadres over who really controls the party.
The deep rift between the charismatic and defiant Nawaz and his crowd-pulling and rebellious daughter Maryam and the dour but famed administrator and would-be prime minister Shahbaz must be healed before PML-N stands a chance of making a roaring comeback to power in Islamabad a fourth time in 35 years.
Will both brothers stand their ground and part ways or make up? The stakes are high. If Shahbaz stays quiet, the party may find it difficult to remain electorally relevant, even if it stays a star political player. But if Nawaz backtracks, the party loses its current status as the only party that directly confronts the country’s powerful security establishment.
For PML-N to remain the political powerhouse that it is, the Sharif brothers have little choice but to stay united in whatever course of action they choose – whether it is to confront or extend an olive branch. A two-road PML-N will end up nowhere.
- Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science.
Twitter: @adnanrehmat1