The elections in Pakistan appear to have been surprisingly won by independent candidates. In many cases they had support from the party of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who had fallen from grace.
This is evident from provisional results that the electoral commission released on Friday evening, much later than expected. Nawaz Sharif, candidate on behalf of the conservative PML-N, initially claimed the win. Later in the day he said he wanted to work on a coalition government. With the help of artificial intelligence, the imprisoned Khan demanded in a video on X the profit as well.
By 8 p.m. local time, 86 independent candidates had won a seat, according to the commission. The PML-N of Nawaz Sharif, also a former prime minister, then had 61 seats, far fewer than the 133 needed to govern without other parties.
The PML-N campaign has dominated the streets in recent weeks. It was therefore generally assumed that the elections had been decided in Sharif’s favor with the support of the military. The army, which has a powerful political role in Pakistan, would prefer the man who has been prime minister three times before.
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Sharif’s rival Imran Khan, the 2018 election winner, headed for conflict with the military elite during his term. In 2022 he was voted out in a vote of no confidence. The former cricketer has been in custody for several months after convictions for corruption and leaking state secrets. According to Khan, these cases are part of a conspiracy against him.
Khan himself could therefore not participate in the campaigns for Thursday’s elections. His PTI party has been virtually paralyzed in recent months by large-scale arrests. PTI could not campaign as one organization, so candidates had to stand for election ‘separately’.
Silent followers
Despite this opposition, it now appears that an unexpected number of votes have been cast ‘for Khan’. According to political scientist and security expert Rifaat Hussain, this can be explained in several ways.
“Khan already had support from young voters,” he said in Islamabad on Friday morning. “The fact that they actually voted was probably due to PTI’s use of social media.” Earlier, analysts talked about the many ‘silent’ supporters of PTI. They too were ‘mobilised’. According to Hussain, this was possible because Khan was seen as an underdog. “Whether the prison sentences he received shortly before the elections were justified or not, people felt sympathy. The repression against PTI supporters was extremely harsh and visible. Perhaps that made people so angry that they wanted to cast an anti-establishment vote.”
For example, the army may have misjudged the effect of its attempts to sideline an opponent. “From the fact that the result became a neck-and-neck race, I already conclude that the army did not have things as under control as it probably thought,” says Hussain.
Fury
The fact that the first results were not available for a long time already aroused anger on Thursday evening. The PTI stated that the long waiting time was used to manipulate the results. The forms on which the results from various polling stations are collected in the constituencies are allegedly being tampered with. That would explain why PLM-N had a brief lead on Friday morning.
Pending the complete final results, there was further speculation on Friday about the next steps of the independent candidates. They have three days to declare whether they will join an existing party. PTI expects them to come under Khan’s umbrella again. Party spokesperson Raoof Hasan previously told NRC: “Those who have stayed with Khan over the past two years are true supporters who have not been intimidated.” But not all independent candidates were PTI members. The number of seats of the various parties can therefore still vary.
Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, who returned from self-imposed exile before the elections and whose previous corruption convictions were annulled, also looked further at coalition building on Friday. The third major party, the PPP (39 seats on Friday afternoon), would like to cooperate. In a victory speech to supporters in Lahore, Sharif called the PML-N “the largest party.”
Update (9/2): This post has been updated with Khan’s AI victory speech.