Former Pakistanis Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has called on all political parties to unite in a government, as preliminary results from the country’s parliamentary elections appeared to deliver a hung parliament following the strong showing of independent candidates affiliated with his rival, jailed ex- Prime Minister Imran Khan.
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) announced on February 9 that independents backed by Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e Insaf (PTI) won around 86 seats in the 266-member national assembly, while Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) garnered 59, and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) obtained 44 mandates among the 201 constituencies where results were called. The remainder are spread among other small parties and candidates.
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Imran Khan Supporters Take Shock Lead As Pakistani Election Count Continues
PTI was banned from participating in the vote because the ECP said it failed to properly register as a party. Its candidates then decided to run as independents after the Supreme Court and the ECP said they couldn’t use the party symbol — a cricket bat. Parties in the country use symbols to help illiterate voters find them on the ballots.
“We respect the mandate of all the political parties and the independent candidates,” Sharif told supporters in the eastern city of Lahore.
“We invite them to come and sit with us to take Pakistan out of this crisis.”
Sharif said that crisis-hit Pakistan needs a decade of stability to recover from a crippling economic malaise that has seen Pakistanis struggle with runaway inflation while Islamabad scrambles to repay more than $130 in foreign debt.
He said he was sending his younger brother and former prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, as an envoy to approach the PPP and other political parties for coalition talks.
SEE ALSO: 'Nothing Will Change': Pakistani Army's Alleged Election Meddling Dashes Hopes For Real TransformationBut Asad Qaisar, a PTI leader reelected to the parliament, rejected Sharif's call. He said that, as the majority party, only PTI has the right to form the new government.
The ECP said that technical glitches prevented it from quickly announcing the results. However, candidates across Pakistan have claimed irregularities and vote rigging in the elections, while some parts of the country were rocked by bombings during the campaign and voting day itself.
The elections were held in a highly polarized environment as Khan, the former cricket superstar, was kept out of the election. He is currently in prison after he was convicted of graft and leaking state secrets. He also saw his marriage annulled by a court.
Yet the PTI-backed independents have emerged as the largest bloc in the new parliament. Under Pakistani law, they must join a political party within 72 hours after their election victory is officially confirmed. They can join the PTI, if it takes the required administrative steps to be cleared and approved as a party by the ECP.
Khan, 71, was prime minister in 2018-22. He still enjoys huge popularity, but his political future and return to the political limelight is unclear.
The PPP, led by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, a former foreign minister who is the son of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, could play kingmaker if no single party receives enough parliamentary seats to form a government outright.
TheFebruary 8 vote took place amid rising political tensions and an upsurge of violence that prompted authorities to deploy thousands of extra security forces across the country and shut down mobile phone service in border areas.
The ECP declared the election successful, with ECP chief Sikandar Sultan Raja saying the polls had been "100 percent transparent and peaceful," despite deadly violence that claimed five lives on election day following another 30 election-related deaths on February 7 in the southwestern Balochistan Province.
More than 650,000 army, paramilitary, and police personnel were deployed across Pakistan on election day tasked with ensuring the security of the vote by acting Prime Minister Anwar ul-Haq Kakar, who also ordered the closure of the borders with Iran and Afghanistan.
The government said the suspension of mobile networks was the cause for the unusually slow pace of the vote-counting process.
But the measure sparked severe criticism from the opposition and human rights watchdogs, with Khan’s PTI calling it “a severe assault on democracy" and a “cowardly attempt by those in power to stifle dissent, manipulate the elections' outcome, and infringe upon the rights of the Pakistani people."
The U.S. State Department said it was concerned about steps taken to "restrict freedom of expression" in Pakistan, especially those related to phone and Internet access.
The new parliament of nuclear-armed Pakistan will have to deal with galloping inflation running close to 30 percent and an acute political crisis prompted by Khan's jailing shortly ahead of the vote.