Pakistan president wants election date set amid political crisis

GBNews24 Desk//

Pakistan President Arif Alvi on Wednesday told the election commission to fix a date for a new national ballot, as the supreme court sat to decide the legality of political manoeuvres that led to parliament being dissolved.

The court must rule if the deputy speaker of the national assembly violated the constitution by refusing to allow a no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Imran Khan at the weekend.

Had the vote taken place Khan was certain to have been booted from office, but the move allowed him to get the loyalist president to dissolve parliament and order an election.

The opposition have cried foul and are refusing to cooperate with forming an interim government to oversee any ballot, but on Wednesday Alvi upped the ante, AFP reports.

A statement from his office said the election commission had been told to propose a date “in order to carry out the mandate of the Constitution”.

– On the campaign trail –

While the opposition applies its resources to the court, Khan effectively hit the campaign trail — telling party workers in Lahore late Tuesday that he would be more careful in picking candidates to stand for his Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.

Khan’s woes started weeks ago when a group of rebel PTI lawmakers threatened to vote against him, but his fragile ruling coalition was beginning to unravel anyway.

There had been high hopes for Khan when he was elected in 2018 on a promise of sweeping away decades of entrenched corruption and cronyism, but he struggled to maintain support with soaring inflation, a feeble rupee and crippling debt.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan has been wracked by political crises for much of its 75-year existence, and no prime minister has ever seen out a full term.