ISLAMABAD: Three-time former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who returned home earlier this year after four years of self-imposed exile in London to lead his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party in general elections, will run from the northwestern town of Mansehra, his family told reporters on Wednesday.

Sharif’s last three terms as prime minister in 1990-93, 1997-99, and 2013-17 ended before he could complete his tenures, as he was removed by a military-backed president in 1993, ousted in a military coup in 1999, and disqualified by the Supreme Court in 2017. He has lived in self-exile in the UK since 2019 after he was convicted in two separate corruption cases and got seven- and ten-year jail terms. The 2018 election was won by the party of now-jailed former prime minister Imran Khan.

Since his return to Pakistan in October, Sharif has been acquitted in two major corruption cases, paving the way for his participation in the election, scheduled for Feb. 8.

“Nawaz Sharif will be our election candidate from NA-15 (Mansehra-II),” his son-in-law Muhammad Safdar told reporters outside the deputy commissioner’s office in Mansehra where he had come to receive nomination papers.

“He will become the prime minister as an elected representative of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa [province] to address the province’s deprivation.”

Mansehra is considered a stronghold of the PML-N party which won a seat there in the 2013 and 2018 elections. Khan’s Pakstan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) had ruled the province from 2013-2023. 

Since moving to London in 2019 when he was allowed to leave Pakistan for medical treatment, Sharif is believed to have steered his family’s PML-N party, as his brother Shehbaz Sharif oversaw legal changes smoothing his return after becoming PM for a year and a half, replacing Khan who was removed from office in a parliament no-trust vote in April 2022.

Independent analysts and Sharif’s opponents say his comeback has been brokered in a backroom deal with the powerful army establishment, which has cracked down on the Sharifs’ greatest rival, Khan, currently jailed. 

The army denies it interferes in politics.