Across Pakistan, colourful posters of candidates and their party symbols — tigers, arrows, kites — are strung over alleys and roads in a carnivalesque reminder of the scale of Thursday’s general election in the country of 240mn people.
Absent from the display, however, is arguably the most talked-about symbol of all: the cricket bat representing the party of Imran Khan, the World Cup-winning all-rounder who went on to become prime minister and Pakistan’s most popular leader in a generation.
The 71-year-old is watching the election unfold from a jail cell, barred from competing. Last week he was handed three sentences for corruption, leaking state secrets and illegal marriage that could lead to him being imprisoned for more than a decade.
His Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party is allowed to field candidates but its leaders are either locked up themselves or in hiding. Candidates loyal to the party say they are unable to openly campaign, instead holding secret meetings and broadcasting to voters from hide-outs as they hope for a shock result.
Few doubt who is behind the crackdown, which has in under a year turned the PTI from favourites into an electoral husk: Pakistan’s powerful army. The 500,000-strong force has long been the country’s ultimate power broker not only in defence but also in politics, economic policy and even business.
Khan was once a beneficiary of military patronage, but after a falling out he launched one of the biggest challenges to the authority of the army since the end of dictatorship in 2008, mobilising thousands of passionate supporters around Pakistan in a high-stakes bid for power.
Now that he is in jail, the election is set to restore nuclear-armed Pakistan to a status quo of “hybrid” civilian-military rule. For this, the military is counting on parties like the Pakistan Muslim League-N of three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif or the Pakistan People’s party, whose head Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is the son of slain former leader Benazir Bhutto, to be more pliant.
But it may be a pyrrhic victory for the army and its chief, General Asim Munir. The attempt to crush the uniquely powerful Khan has provoked outrage among young people, middle classes and elites swept up by his rhetoric, leaving many supporters feeling the election amounts to a thinly disguised military takeover.
“The establishment usually was very savvy. They never went against public opinion,” says Hammad Azhar, a former PTI minister, using a common Pakistani euphemism for the military. “This time it’s completely different . . . they’re not subtle, they’re very out in the open, they’re blunt.”
Data from pollster Gallup Pakistan suggests that, as of last month, Khan remained Pakistan’s most popular politician with an approval rating of 57 per cent.
The military has denied intervening, and the caretaker government has vowed to conduct free and fair elections. But it is an acutely sensitive time for political instability. Pakistan’s economy is in crisis, with inflation at 30 per cent in December, and the country narrowly averted default in June thanks to a $3bn IMF bailout.
The pre-poll machinations risk undermining the credibility of the next government, leaving it without a genuine popular mandate at a time when it must secure a new IMF deal to avert default. It also threatens to erode trust in the army, at a time when Pakistan is battling a surge in militant violence. About three-dozen people have been killed since Monday in separate attacks.
“If the election . . . is deemed to lack integrity it will undermine the legitimacy of the exercise and plunge Pakistan into instability and even unrest,” says Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the US and the UK.
The election also represents a test of whether “lawfare” — the use of the law to punish popular opposition leaders — works or only makes its targets stronger. It is a question being debated everywhere from Venezuela, where the top court last month banned the opposition’s presidential hopeful, to the US, where Donald Trump is battling a list of legal woes ahead of this November’s election.
“Pakistan has tried lawfare against popular political leaders going back years,” says Uzair Younus, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council think-tank. “It’s an ongoing thing we’re seeing in many parts of the world. But Pakistan’s history shows that using it against popular opposition politicians more often than not backfires.”
Since its partition from British-ruled India in 1947, Pakistan has oscillated between military rule and its so-called hybrid regime.
Supporters of this system argue that the army has kept the country together amid turbulent politics, a weak economy and threats from insurgencies and its historical adversary, India. Yet critics say its meddling beyond defence exacerbates Pakistan’s instability.
“The military has a saviour complex,” says Elizabeth Threlkeld, a former US official in Pakistan and senior fellow at the Stimson Center think-tank. “It sees itself as the most competent institution in Pakistan. It sees the civilian politicians as corrupt and lazy. And as the situation gets more dire, you see them get more overt.”
Despite Pakistan being a key Nato partner during the war in Afghanistan, elements within the security services cultivated Islamist militants, some of whom unleashed extremist violence on the Pakistani people themselves.
The army has also long picked electoral winners, including its current bête noire. Khan, who launched his party in 1996, was a marginal political player until his religion-tinged, anti-corruption message began winning over Pakistanis — including army officers — sick of the country’s notoriously venal political dynasties.
After then Prime Minister Sharif was linked in the 2016 Panama Papers leak to unaccounted offshore wealth, jailed and banned for life from holding office, Khan ascended to the premiership in 2018 in a process analysts say was helped along by the military.
Yet Khan too eventually fell out of favour, clashing with the army over military appointments and struggling to manage Pakistan’s boom-and-bust economy. He was removed through a no-confidence vote in 2022 and replaced by a coalition of the PML-N and PPP under Shehbaz Sharif, brother of Nawaz.
Once in opposition, Khan turned on the generals in raucous rallies, and even publicly implicated an officer in a botched attempt on his life later that year.
After pro-PTI crowds vandalised some military installations in May, the army’s patience ran out. Within months Khan was in jail on corruption charges, thousands of his supporters were detained and senior PTI leaders had quit the party en masse.
One of them, who was arrested multiple times, recalls being offered a choice. “Officials would come to me to say that unless I renounce my association with PTI, I would soon return to jail,” the person says. “I didn’t take them seriously. But then my release order became a joke, and ultimately I decided to publicly denounce my party and move on with my life.”
With Khan in jail, the army set about consolidating its control. In June, the government appointed army chief Munir to a new investment promotion council, a role not typically taken by a military officer.
On a US visit in December, Munir met not only defence counterparts but secretary of state Antony Blinken — an indication of where Washington thinks true power in Pakistan lies.
The military has considerable financial interests of its own, with the UN Development Programme in 2021 describing the networks of army-controlled real estate or fertiliser companies as “the largest conglomerate of business entities in Pakistan”.
“The Pakistan army wants stability so that Pakistan can focus on the revival of the economy,” says Farooq Hameed Khan, a former army brigadier. A former government official is more blunt: “The army is quite worried about the economy. [It] believes that politicians alone can neither make it successful, nor will foreign investors trust them.”
The military also appeared to pick a favoured candidate ahead of Thursday’s polls. In October, Nawaz Sharif returned to Pakistan after four years of self-imposed exile. A series of court rulings — including the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the ban on holding office — allowed the 74-year-old to run again in what analysts described as a “backroom deal”.
Sharif, who first served as prime minister in the 1990s, has presented himself as a veteran well-equipped to handle the country’s economic challenges. If he had not been removed, “not a single person would have been unemployed, there would be nothing like poverty”, he told supporters on his return. “Today conditions are so bad that one has to think if they can feed their children or pay electricity bills.”
Pollsters expect PML-N to win the most seats in the polls thanks to its presence in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province by population, with the PPP dominant in smaller Sindh.
At the same time, institutions like the Election Commission have cracked down on the PTI, including banning it from using its electoral symbol — a vital way for illiterate voters to identify the candidate in polling booths.
“The Election Commission and the caretaker government, with the army’s backing, are openly making it difficult for any sympathiser of the PTI to conduct their election campaign,” says Hasan Askari Rizvi, the author of several books on the army. “The biggest risk from these developments is that this is seen as the most unfair election in Pakistan’s history.” The UN’s human rights body this week said it was disturbed by what it called a “pattern of harassment” against the party.
Anwar ul-Haq Kakar, Pakistan’s caretaker prime minister, told journalists on Wednesday that there was no “systematic pattern” of targeting parties. The military was “not directly nor indirectly interfering in the political process”, he added.
Unable to hold rallies, the PTI has resorted to unconventional tactics. The party has broadcast speeches using an AI-generated clone of Khan’s voice, and hosted events on TikTok.
On a recent morning, supporters assembled at a secretive gathering at a farmhouse in a village in Punjab province. The PTI’s local candidate — who invited the Financial Times on the condition that they not be named — spoke to some 300 attendees about how their “freedom of democratic choice” had been taken away. “I usually make a brief appearance for a meeting and then go underground again,” the candidate later explained.
The crackdown appears to have done little to damp the party’s appeal at a time of severe economic hardship. “The PTI will be good for poor people,” says Ayaz Khan, a PTI-supporting farmer in his mid-thirties who had to pull half of his six children out of school to save money. “Never before have Pakistanis suffered in this way.”
Whoever wins the election faces daunting challenges with potentially global ramifications.
With the IMF package set to end as soon as April, analysts say the authorities will need to return to the fund for immediate support if they are to avoid another near-repeat of a bankruptcy that could become one of the biggest burdens on the global debt restructuring architecture since the Covid-19 pandemic. At about $100bn, Pakistan has more foreign debt than Zambia, Sri Lanka and Ghana combined, according to IMF data.
This is likely to mean agreeing to austerity measures such as tax increases and privatisations to bolster chronically low government revenues, unpopular choices that will require a strong electoral mandate. Pakistan has only completed a handful of about two-dozen IMF programmes since the 1950s.
Critics say the parties likely to lead the next government are ill-equipped for this task. The PML-N and PPP “don’t have a plan for the economy”, says Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, who served as prime minister from 2017 to 2018 under the PML-N but is planning to launch a new party. “Inflation and growth will remain serious issues. Pakistan will have to stay the course with the IMF. Pakistan needs massive reforms . . . More of the same will not work.”
In addition, the country must tackle a resurgence of extremist violence, with an alarming increase in Islamic militancy spilling over from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. More than 1,500 people were killed in terrorist attacks in Pakistan last year, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a 50 per cent increase from 2021.
Given the stakes, the military may be unwilling to risk the prospect of civil unrest by continuing to suppress the PTI. The perceived injustice of its leader’s incarceration risks stoking more passionate support.
“Imran Khan has to come out of jail one way or the other. The people are too strong and will not accept it,” Shandana Gulzar Khan, a candidate for the PTI, says. “The kind of loyalty I see on the streets is amazing. These are people who have no water, no food, no electricity . . . and yet they stand ready to die [with] him.”
His legal obstacles may yet be overcome. A separate corruption conviction from last year has already been suspended, and lawyers are sceptical that the three from last week can survive an appeals process.
If momentum behind Khan continues, analysts say it may only be a matter of time until the military is forced to make a deal. Pakistan’s populist may emerge more popular than ever.
“People love an underdog,” the Atlantic Council’s Younus says. “So long as Khan remains behind bars . . . he will continue to capture the imagination of a significant proportion of Pakistanis.”
