ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s parliament on Monday elected opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif as the new prime minister after Imran Khan was removed in a confidence motion at the weekend.
Shehbaz, younger brother three-time former premier Nawaz Sharif,secured 174 votes in the 342-member National Assembly.
Not a single vote was tallied for his opponent, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, as Khan’s party boycotted the election minutes before the decision.
A 70-year-old cancer survivor, Shehbaz has been in politics since1988 and has served as the chief minister of the country’s most populous and politically significant central province of Punjab.
The voting to elect the new prime minister was held after the parliament voted out Khan through an opposition-led no-confidence motion. Khan’s party on Monday announced it was resigning en masse from the parliament, in a move poised to further aggravate the ongoing political turmoil in the South Asian nuclear power
Meanwhile, Sharif, leader of the centrist Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) was the only candidate after Khan loyalist Shah Mahmood Qureshi, the former foreign minister, withdrew his candidacy and resigned his seat.
“It’s a victory of righteousness, and evil has been defeated,” Sharif said to cheers from lawmakers.
Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party had 155 lawmakers in the 342-seat chamber before the mass resignations, and Sharif was elected with 174 votes. His first task will be to form a cabinet that will also draw heavily from the centre-left Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), as well as find space for the smaller conservative Jamiat-ulema-e-Islam-F (JUI-F) group.
The PPP and PML-N are dynastic parties that have dominated Pakistani politics for decades but their relations are sure to fray in the lead-up to the next election, which must be held by October 2023. They need to tackle soaring inflation, a feeble rupee and crippling debt, while militancy is also on the rise — with Pakistan’s Taliban emboldened by the return to power last year of the group in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Shehbaz Sharif is the younger brother of disgraced three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Pakistan media are already speculating the latter may soon return from exile in Britain.
The elder Sharif was dismissed in 2017 and later jailed for 10 years by an accountability court on graft charges after revelations from the Panama Papers, but was released to seek medical treatment abroad. – AFP