Three-way contest for PM on the cards

ISLAMABAD, Oct 24: An apparent deadlock in moves to form a ruling coalition promises a
three-way contest for the next prime minister after the newly-elected National Assembly is
convened, possibly early next month.

All the three major political groups in the National Assembly have almost named their prime
ministerial candidates after each of them failed to bring round another to form a stable coalition.

The Pakistan Muslim League (Q), which emerged as the largest party in the Oct 10 election, said
on Thursday it would announce its candidate after a schedule for the prime minister’s election
was announced.

But political sources said former Balochistan chief minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali was a
strong contender favoured by party’s parliamentary leader Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain among
three to four aspirants for the contest against Makhdoom Amin Fahim of People’s Party
Parliamentarians and Maulana Fazlur Rehman of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal.

FAHIM MOVE STALLED: Amin Fahim’s famous initiative, backed by his party
chief Benazir Bhutto, to form a PPP-led “government of national consensus” that
could include the PML(Q) seems to have been virtually killed by opposition from
the party’s own allies in the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy and the
PML(Q)’s decision to field its own candidate.

The People’s Party Parliamentarians, which is headed by Mr Fahim, became the second largest
group in the National Assembly with 64 seats compared to 77 won by the PML(Q).

In the absence of a multi-party consensus, the MMA, which is the third largest
group with 45 seats, has stuck to Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s candidature, which it
has begun selling even to suspicious Western countries fearing the emergence of a

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Taliban-like ruler in Pakistan.
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No date has yet been set for the first meeting of the new National Assembly to elect
its speaker and deputy speaker although President Pervez Musharraf had
promised earlier this month to hand over his Chief Executive’s powers to the new
prime minister around Nov 1.

Political sources said the presidential promise might not be met but the assembly
was likely to be convened sometime in early November.

There is no apparent hitch left in convening the assembly after a deadline passed
on Thursday for independent deputies to voluntarily join any party for
determining the allocation of 60 seats reserved for women and 10 for non-Muslim
minority communities.

It will now take the Election Commission mere computation to notify which
independents have joined which party and allocate the reserved seats under a
system of proportional representation to parties taking at least five per cent of the
general seats.

LIKELY RUNOFF: Legal sources said the election of a prime minister by a majority
of the total membership of 342-seat house — Law Minister Khalid Ranjah has said
it will be through secret ballot — must immediately follow the election of the
speaker and deputy speaker.

If the candidates of all the three major groups remain in the field, there seems hardly any chance
of any of them winning the required majority of 172 members in the first round of election. In
that case, the matter will be settled by a runoff between the two rivals securing the highest
number of votes, the legal sources said.