Summary Millions of Pakistanis will vote today (Saturday) to elect new representatives for a five-year team.
ISLAMABAD (Online) - Millions of Pakistanis will go to the polls May 11 in elections that, while overshadowed by Taliban threats, will mark a historic democratic transition of power in a nuclear-armed state used to military rule.
Pakistan’s more than 86 million voters have the choice of 4,670 candidates standing for the 342-member lower house of Parliament and nearly 11,000 candidates running for four regional assemblies.
Polls open at 8:00 am (0300 GMT) and close at 5:00 pm, allowing an electorate of more than 86 million to vote for the 342-member national assembly and four provincial assemblies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan.
More than 600,000 security personnel have deployed nationwide and around half the estimated 70,000 polling stations have been declared at risk of attack, many of them in insurgency-torn parts of Baluchistan and the northwest.
The militant group has announced plans to carry out suicide bombings during the election in a bid to undermine the poll, according to a letter from the leader of the group. Hakimullah Mehsud, in a message to the group’s spokesman, outlined plans for attacks, including suicide blasts, in all four of the country’s provinces.
The race has been dominated by opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), and former cricket star Imran Khan, who is looking to make a breakthrough for his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Sharif, a steel tycoon, is considered the frontrunner and tipped to become the first politician to serve three terms as prime minister. He was first in the post from 1990 to 1993, until he was sacked for corruption, and from 1997 until 1999, when he was deposed by a military coup.
Khan, who won only one seat in 2002 and boycotted polls in 2008, has led an electric campaign, galvanizing the middle class and young people in what he has called a “tsunami” of support that will propel him into office.
The main outgoing Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has run a lackluster, rudderless campaign without a leader. Its election advertising still stars Benazir Bhutto, its charismatic prime minister assassinated in 2007.
Her son, Bilawal, is too young to run for Parliament and Taliban threats have prevented him from addressing public rallies. His father, President Asif Ali Zardari, is barred from campaigning as head of state and is anyway deeply divisive and unpopular.
Meanwhile, gunmen kidnapped the son of a former Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on the last day of campaigning for elections and shot dead one of the son’s aides, police said. Ali Haider Gilani, a candidate for the Punjab provincial assembly, was seized in a hail of gunfire on the outskirts of the city of Multan.
Former President Pervez Musharraf has been also barred from contesting in elections for life since returning in late March from self-imposed exile. He is currently under house arrest.
The polls are considered critical to strengthening democracy in Pakistan, marking the first time that an elected civilian government completes a full term and hands over to another in a country that has been ruled by the army for half its existence.
