Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former captain of a cricket team, took over as the country’s prime minister after winning the vote of confidence on Friday, with 176 lawmakers in support against 96 votes for Shehbaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). The opposition Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) led by former president Asif Ali Zardari and some smaller regional groups abstained from the vote.
Mr Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party won the most seats in last month’s bitterly-fought general election, though it fell short of an outright majority. The PTI secured 116 parliamentary seats out of 272 that were contested. The PML-N, which came second in the election and is controlled by the Sharif family, and the PPP, which came third and is run by the Bhuttos family, jointly won 107 seats.
The election campaign was marred by concerns of military manipulation. Both the PML-N and the PPP claim that the PTI was helped by interference from the country’s powerful security services, alleging that their candidates were being harassed into defecting to the PTI, something Mr Khan and the army deny (the army has controlled Pakistan directly for around half of the country’s 71-year history).
Mr Khan set up the PTI in 1996, after retiring from international cricket, on a platform of eradicating corruption in the country and more equitable society. He hoped to win the election in 2013, but came a distant third. The corruption campaign he waged against Nawaz Sharif, a three-time prime minister, ended with Mr Sharif’s imprisonment for corruption on charges linked to the purchase of luxury property in London (Mr Sharif is now serving a 10-year jail sentence). Documents released through the Panama Papers leak helped build the case against the former prime minister, whose daughter and son-in-law are also in jail on corruption-related charges.
The new prime minister will have to deal with an impending economic crisis as for years Pakistan has imported more than it exported, leading to a gradual depletion of its foreign-exchange reserves, which are down to just $9 billion, barely two months’ import cover. The nation’s current-account deficit, a broad measure of the imbalance between imports and exports, has widened to an alarming $18 billion in the year through June. Higher crude prices having contributed to the problems. The budget deficit stands at about 7 per cent of gross domestic product.
So far, Islamabad has kept going with the help of loans from Beijing, which has also promised $60 billion of infrastructure spending under President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road initiative (Beijing views the Belt and Road initiative as a way to project its power and secure allies). It remains unknown how sustainable Pakistan’s debt to China is.
Pakistan may need more than $12 billion to plug the finance gap. An IMF bail-out, therefore, looks all but inevitable. However, Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, has said that Washington will oppose any bailout that pays off Chinese loans. As the largest contributor to the IMF, the US has considerable sway over its decisions.
Mr Khan has pledged to improve tax collection and spend more on public services. Although any IMF loan would see the Fund impose restrictions on public spending that could undermine his campaign trail promises of creating an “Islamic welfare state”.
Mr Khan is socially conservative. He supports strict blasphemy laws, which include the death penalty, and argue that feminism is degrading the traditional role of motherhood.
Johannes Zielcke
