End of the road for Pakistan’s powerful political party, PML-N?
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The last two by-elections in May and October this year have seen the complete routing out of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) from its home base Punjab by the challenger, the Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI). On July 18, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) conducted by-elections on 20 provincial assembly seats that had become vacant after a court decision that disqualified PTI members for voting for an opposition candidate in the election of chief minister against the directions of the party leadership. In the hotly contested elections under the PMLN administration in Punjab, the PTI won 15 seats, losing one to an independent candidate and four to the PMLN. The voter turnout was 49.7 percent which is very high by by-election standards. The elections were a crucial test of popularity for the two parties. The PTI’s comeback with a thumping majority was a rude shock for the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), an alliance of 13 political parties widely speculated to have been allegedly cobbled together by Pakistan’s powerful security establishment to throw Imran Khan out of power.
One couldn’t miss the loud bang of popular anger against the PDM and its patrons that have wished to end the political chapter of Imran Khan and his party. The headlines in the newspapers, the talk-shows on television channels and the public gossip ridiculed the hollow claims of the ruling alliance that together they could defeat the PTI at polls. Interestingly, only the PMLN fielded the candidates. Nothing was good enough to save the day for the PMLN and its backers.
Having lost squarely, the PMLN and allies thought of a counterstrategy to regain some political capital by hoping to win the next round of by-elections on seats of their own choosing. Reacting to the ‘arranged’ vote-of-no-confidence on April 9, the 123 members tendered their resignations from the National Assembly on April 14. Out of all these, the Speaker of the National Assembly chose to accept only 11 resignations of the members from the constituencies where the PDM had strong support and had lost with a small margin in the 2018 general election. It proved to be a big mistake to go for another cycle of by-elections on October 16. Out of 8 National and 3 Punjab Assembly seats, the PTI won six national and two Punjab seats, showing once more that the PMLN had lost much of its political ground in Punjab.
Ongoing political polarization and political contest represents the dialectics of change and the status quo Pakistan’s old parties and political families leading them represent.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
It may be argued that the Sharif dynasty in Punjab is down but not out yet and remains a potent political force to be reckoned with. This is exactly the script of the PMLN propagandists to overcome the political and psychological effects of the two successive electoral debacles. What went wrong with their strategy to retain their grip on the politics of Punjab? Answering this question should require more to dig into the social and demographic transformation of Punjab than citing incidental explanations of rising inflation, economic chaos and the troubled legacies left by the PTI government. What is hurting the PMLN, and its one dozen allies, is the generational change in the voters. The youth that comprises roughly 60 percent of Pakistan’s population has been mesmerized by Khan’s leadership and message of change. The ruling alliance misreads the sociology of young people as being ‘misled’. Ongoing political polarization and political contest represents the dialectics of change— whatever it stands for— and the status quo that the old parties and the political families leading them represent.
It is also important to understand why the youth, general public from the middle classes, urban professionals and women, have increasingly become mobilized and active in support of Khan. The PMLN has lost the narrative and credibility by joining all those parties that it had been in conflict with for decades. The way they have conducted themselves in power during the past six months— amending the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) law to get out of graft cases and using this and other agencies to withdraw cases against them in the courts including PKR 16 billion in a money laundering case against the Prime Minister and his son— has lent more credibility to the narrative of the PTI. Had the PMLN allowed the PTI to complete its tenure, carrying the heavy baggage of incompetence and bumbling in the Punjab through the next elections in 2023, the League might have been the largest party in the province.
Finally, the PMLN compromised on its narrative ‘respect the vote,’ a veiled reference to allegations of interventions by Pakistan’s powerful military in elected governments. The contradiction between a principled position and opportunism is too obvious to hide and the image and optics’ fallout are just too disastrous for the PMLN to hope for recovery anytime soon.
- Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Twitter: @RasulRais
