Pakistan election campaign gains momentum

December 16th, 2007 Aimon · 1 Comment

Source: The Times of India
ISLAMABAD: As the winter chill sets in across Pakistan, political parties are making a concerted pitch to come to power in next month’s general election despite fears expressed by several leaders that the polls would not be free and fair.

With a little over three weeks to go for the January 8 polls, leaders like former Premiers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have hit the campaign trail, trying to woo voters with promises of ushering in genuine democracy and ending military rule.

Observers believe that the ruling PML-Q has an edge over Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Sharif’s PML-N as it began working to woo rural voters much before the poll schedule was even announced. The PML-Q could, however, be hit by two factors its support for the increasingly unpopular President Pervez Musharraf and the lack of any charismatic leaders.

Former federal minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, a confidant of Musharraf, recently joked that Sharif’s PML-N had “good jockeys but no horses” to run the electoral race while the PML-Q, which ruled Pakistan for the past five years, had “good horses but no jockeys”.

The PML-N has the added disadvantage of entering the election arena only after failing in an attempt to get all political parties to boycott the polls. The attempt fell by the wayside as the PPP refused to join the boycott and only a handful of smaller parties, including Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf and the Jamaat-e-Islami, decided to abstain.