Skip to footer

Pakistan elections: Who are the main candidates for prime minister?

This election will mark the first transfer of power from one government to another without any military interference. Here is a look at the main candidates for prime minister.

4. Raja Parvez Ashraf, Pakistan People's Party (current party in power)

Fareed Khan/AP
Pakistani men watch a TV broadcast of Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf addressing the country, at an electronic shop in Karachi, Pakistan, March 16.

Raja Parvez Ashraf was the last prime minister of Pakistan. A leader of the Bhutto family's political party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), he became prime minister in June after the Supreme Court fired his predecessor. He has tried to stand for reelection since the beginning of April.

Yet, accused of misappropriating funds and corruption, he has been barred from running.  

Despite five difficult years at the head of a governing coalition, the PPP is thought to still have resilient support among the rural poor. Some observers believe the ruling PPP still has a strong chance at winning a large number of seats in the Parliament and influencing who is elected as prime minister, as long as Pakistan's rural landowners maintain influence and have a feudal class system in rural Pakistan, which makes up almost 70 percent of the population. 

It is not clear who will stand for prime minister if Mr. Ashraf is unable to. Analysts say that it will likely be someone from his own influential family. (Pakistan is largely run by a set of powerful families, numbering several dozen.) There has been no announcement for a replacement candidate yet.

Out of all of the major political parties vying to get their candidate in the prime minister seat, the PPP has had the most confrontations with the military, some with deadly consequences. Z.A. Bhutto, the father of Benazir Bhutto, was hanged by a military dictator and Ms. Bhutto was assassinated during military rule. 

4 of 4
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.