It is unclear what makes former Prime Minister Imran Khan believe that general elections will take place in April of next year. According to all estimates—and this is quite obvious—the current PDM government is not in the mood for early elections. A large part of this is related to the impending economic catastrophe.
No federal government would deliberately call early elections when inflation is at an all-time high, foreign reserves are practically depleted, and a recession is on the horizon. Some of it, though, and what is likely fueling the PTI’s eager pursuit of early elections, is the notion that the PDM government is fleeing the fight out of fear of defeat. The delay in the LG elections in Islamabad can’t be blamed on anything else.
Despite these projections, national elections appear a long way off; indeed, wise counsel urges that Imran and his party reconsider their insistence on dissolving the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assemblies. Such sound advice would also underscore the PTI’s acceptance of the PDM-PPP leadership’s proposals for a return to parliament.
Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has now echoed this suggestion, welcoming Imran’s return to parliament and urging him to be a part of the democratic system rather than contributing to the chaos that threatens to destabilise the country’s democracy.
With only three days till the end of the year, politics remains as unstable as it was in April. One would have assumed that the disastrous floods would have put a stop to the political squabbles. That was not the case. One would think that a near-disaster economy would have forced the political world into anything approaching respectable negotiations.
But, given the circumstances, our political leaders will almost certainly enter 2023 arguing and squabbling. While the PDM government wishes to complete its term and the stars appear to be aligned in its favour at the present, the PTI is on a warpath and would rather burn the system down in order to force early elections. It has already used its nuclear option by declaring the dissolution of the Punjab and KP assemblies.
Even if the Punjab chief minister is reinstated by the court, it appears doubtful that the province’s parliament will be dissolved anytime soon, given reports that a few PTI and PML-Q MPs had contacted the Punjab PDM opposition ahead of Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi’s vote of confidence.
In all of this, the only pro-people, pro-democracy, and smart political solution would be for the PTI to return to the assembly. How can early elections fix a situation in which there is no agreement or even an attempt at agreement on several fundamental issues, such as electoral reform, the ECP, and so on? How will early elections resolve anything when the majority of political parties are opposed to them? Without a political consensus and difficult decisions, Pakistan will be unable to recover from its current economic crisis.
And the PTI is a genuine popular political party without which progress will be difficult. Regardless of how naive the dream, a new year’s resolution for the country’s political realm is for political parties to finally start putting people’s interests ahead of their own.
