It is the day after and Imran Khan is on his way towards becoming prime minister. We Pakistanis are really ahead of the game; we’ve had our proto-Trump for about ten years. Fortunately Imran will be more constrained than Trump, and certainly have less power to cause damage. With any luck, they’ll run Pakistan as they have done KP, which has certainly seen some very promising devleopments in the past years, and not get embroiled in attacking Dawn. Given the man’s lack of convictions there is also a chance, as there was with Trump, that he will not take Pakistan rightwards; again a place where this country has an advantage over the US in that politics is not particularly ideological.
I am still uncertain of what has been going on during polling and the vote counts. There are no reliable sources of course, so I am not sure if they were rigged as thoroughly as some are claiming, or if all the rigging was pre-poll. But there’s certainly a mood for change across the country, there is always a mood for change.
I wish Jibran Nasir had won his seat.
Now much will rest on the opposition. It would be understandable, if not admirable, if the PML(N) decides to give PTI a taste of its own medicine and shut down the country for months on end. That is what the PTI did after the last election and it caused immense damage to the economy, to governance and to politics. Possibly, had Nawaz – and certainly Maryan Nawaz – been leading the party instead of being in prison, that is probably what they would have done. (Though Nawaz has some kernel of, I don’t know, atrophied decency? somewhere within him. I was struck by how he behaved after Benazir’s assassination. Maryam on the other hand would fit nicely into the Trump team.) Shahbaz Sharif, who is leading the party now that his brother and niece are in prison, is much more of an administrator. I don’t think rabble rousing comes naturally to him, and he may just retreat to his long-held post of Chief Minister of Punjab (three terms, though not uninterrupted) and snipe from a position of power there.