KARACHI: An alliance of nine opposition political parties called the People’s Democratic Alliance (PDM) on Sunday held a protest rally in Karachi, the second in a series of planned countrywide demonstrations aimed to force the central government to resign and call early elections.

The PDM accuses Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan of coming to power in a 2018 election rigged by the military, which both Khan and the army vociferously deny. The alliance has called for Khan to step down and call a new election. The next general election is scheduled for 2023.

“Your [Khan’s] fear was visible from every word, every action of yours, and people want to see this fear on your face,” Maryam Nawaz, the daughter and political heir of former three-time premier Nawaz Sharif, said in an address to the rally, referring to comments before a youth convention on Saturday.

Khan had said it would now be his “utmost effort” to bring Sharif back to Pakistan to make him face jail. Sharif is currently in London for medical treatment after he was granted permission by a Pakistani court last year to leave the country where he was serving a prison sentence for graft.

Tens of thousands of people, including women, students and children, arrived in convoys from other parts of Sindh province and across Pakistan to gather at Karachi’s Bagh-e-Jinnah ground for the rally.

Maulana Fazlur Rahman, a religious party leader who is the head of the PDM, said Khan’s “incompetent” regime had to step down because it had destroyed the economy.

Indeed, the protest campaign comes at a time when Pakistan is facing acute economic crisis, with inflation touching double digits and negative growth.

“Real democracy is when governments are formed by the will of the people, not on the wave of the finger of the umpire,” Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, whose Pakistan People Party rules Sindh, told the crowd, in a veiled reference to the military.

In a Twitter post on Sunday, in response to the protest, Chaudhry Fawad Hussain, minister for science and a close aide to Khan, called Zardari and Marwaym Nawaz “two children” who had their eyes on the prime minister’s office.

PDM’s next rally will be in the southwestern city of Quetta. In the first rally held in Gujranwala on Friday, Sharif, who addressed the crowd via video link from London, accused top military leaders of toppling his last government.

Sharif was ousted from his second term as PM in a military coup in 2000. His third term, which ran from 2013 to 2017, ended when he was removed by the Supreme Court amid corruption revelations over his personal wealth. He was subsequently convicted of graft but says the accusations are politically motivated.

On October 25 last year, Sharif was granted bail and got court clearance to leave the country for medical treatment in the UK, where he is now based.

In 2019, Sharif’s daughter was also arrested by the anti-corruption bureau while attempting to visit her father at a jail in the city of Lahore. She is currently out on bail in several cases.