Islamabad: Cricket hero Imran Khan has swept to an emphatic victory in a disputed Pakistan election, official figures showed on Friday, but without a majority he will need to enter a coalition to take power in the nuclear-armed country.
The pivotal election has been branded “Pakistan’s dirtiest”, after widespread claims in the months leading up to the vote that the powerful military was trying to fix the playing field in Khan’s favour.
Rival parties, including the outgoing Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), have alleged “blatant” rigging over the vote count. The PML-N, which claims it was the target of the military manipulation, has vowed to fight the results in court.
But for now Khan’s victory represents an end to decades of rotating leadership between the PML-N and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) that was punctuated by periods of military rule.
The Election Commission (ECP) said on Friday that with only a handful of seats left to count, Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) enjoys a strong lead with 115 seats, and will be the biggest party in parliament.
The count indicates PTI will not achieve the 137 seats needed in the National Assembly to form a majority government in its own right.
Analysts had long predicted that if Khan took power it would have to be via coalition — but the size of his lead still took many by surprise, and helped fuel suspicion over vote rigging.
But analyst Ayesha Siddiqa said observers may have underestimated the depth of feeling among Pakistan’s growing middle class.
“This is a middle class revolution,” Siddiqa said. “Remember they grew up on this narrative of a corrupt Pakistan being damaged and needing a new leadership... In all this hue and cry, we didn’t notice there is another Pakistan there that wanted this change.”
Khan campaigned on promises to end widespread graft while building an “Islamic welfare state”.
Now the former World Cup cricket champion will have to try to form a coalition government with independents and smaller parties, a task analysts said should be straightforward.
“That will not be a problem... The independents know that the establishment is inclined towards Imran Khan,” retired general and analyst Talat Masood said, using a word widely understood in Pakistan to mean the military.
The vote was meant to be a rare democratic transition in the country, which has been ruled by the powerful army for roughly half its history, but was marred by violence and allegations of military interference.
The ECP issued the results after being under fire for delays in vote-counting after polls closed. They dismissed the hold-up as a technical glitch.
The “scale of procedural irregularities during the voting process was relatively low”, a Pakistani election observer group, the Free And Fair Election Network (FAFEN), said in its preliminary assessment on Friday.
The group, which said it observed 37,001 of the more than 85,000 polling stations across the country, noted there were irregularities that need to be addressed, but that it expected the ECP to “allay the concerns of major political parties over the integrity of results”. — AFP
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