Parliament to elect new PM on Monday after removing Imran Khan in no-confidence vote
Pakistan’s parliamentarians will meet on Monday to choose a new prime minister, with opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif poised to take power after the overthrow of Imran Khan.
Mr Khan’s leadership of nearly four years ended in the early hours of Sunday after a narrow majority of the National Assembly voted for an opposition no-confidence motion.
The former cricketer had clung on for almost a week after thwarting the united opposition’s first attempt to hold the vote.
He dissolved the parliament and called for fresh elections on April 3, claiming that the attempt to remove him was a foreign plot.
After the Supreme Court ordered the house to reconvene, parliamentarians from his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party attempted to delay and block the ballot during a 13-hour assembly session on Saturday.
The vote was only allowed to proceed after the Speaker and Deputy Speaker both resigned minutes before midnight, when the Supreme Court was due to sit and potentially hold them in contempt.
Nomination papers for the new prime minister must be submitted by 2pm on Sunday and the assembly will reconvene at 11am on Monday to vote for the new prime minister.
Mr Khan’s likely successor is one of the political leaders that he had vowed to purge from Pakistan’s politics when he took power in 2018.
Shehbaz Sharif is the younger brother of Mr Khan’s predecessor, Nawaz Sharif, and is leader of the main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), or PML-N.
The 70-year-old lacks the crowd-pulling power of his elder brother but has the reputation of a hard-working, competent and pragmatic administrator after three terms as chief minister in Punjab province.
Born into a wealthy industrialist family, he studied law and spent time in the family business before eventually entering politics.
His tenure in Punjab involved him spending heavily on big-ticket infrastructure items, while his critics said he did too little to tackle the province’s deep-rooted health and agricultural problems.
Mr Sharif faces corruption allegations which his party says are part of a political vendetta by Mr Khan.
In December 2019, Pakistan’s anti-corruption watchdog, the National Accountability Bureau, accused him of money-laundering and seized nearly two dozen of his properties. He denies wrongdoing and is currently on bail with a trial still pending.
Mr Sharif is widely believed to have better ties with Pakistan’s powerful military than his more uncompromising brother.
“A new dawn has started… This alliance will rebuild Pakistan,” Mr Sharif said in parliament after the vote result was announced.
He said the new government would not slip into the “politics of revenge” and harass Mr Khan or his supporters.
“I don’t want to go back to the bitterness of the past. We want to forget them and move forward,” he said. “We will not take revenge or do injustice; we will not send people to jail for no reason, law and justice will take its course.”
Mr Khan has called for peaceful protests on Sunday evening. The size of the turnout will give the first indication of how much support he will take into opposition.
Comments