Imran Khan, the former Pakistani prime minister, is running for seven of the eight national assembly seats up for grabs in a crucial by-election on Sunday. He calls the vote “a referendum” on his support.
The by-election is the most recent development in the political squabble that started on April 10 when Imran Khan was ousted by a parliamentary no-confidence vote. It occurs as the country struggles to recover from devastating monsoon floods that displaced more than 30 million people and submerged a third of the country.
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In Pakistani elections, candidates may run for multiple positions. If they receive more than one victory, they must decide which to keep, and the others must be lost. He declared during a rally late on Friday in Karachi, a major port city in the south of the 220 million-person country, that “this is not just a routine election, it’s a referendum.”
Since being ousted, Khan has organized dozens of rallies, bringing tens of thousands of people, and he has promised to soon announce the date of a “long march” of his supporters on the capital, Islamabad. Instead of waiting until October of next year, he is requesting that the coalition government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif call for urgent national elections.
He would exert additional pressure on the government, according to political expert Hassan Askari Rizvi, who spoke to AFP. However, the government will reject the election announcement, saying it does not represent the will of the country.
With his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party capturing control of the state parliament in Punjab, the nation’s most populous province, in July, Khan has already won a string of recent by-election triumphs.
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As per reports, Imran Khan’s chances of winning the referendum is quite high considering the support he has been getting from the Pakistani crowd over the campaigning period. What lies ahead is the result of the elections and whether Imran Khan will achieve a position of authority or not.
