The Economist April 16th 2022 31
AsiaPakistanipoliticsA new Sharif in town
I
t was theold Pakistan that Imran Khan,
now the country’s ex-prime minister,
railed against. He promised to banish the
self-serving political establishment, usher
in an era of clean politics and create a new
Islamic welfare state. So it was with visible
glee that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, whose
mother, father and grandfather have all
served as prime minister, president or
both, declared to lawmakers after Mr
Khan’s downfall, “Welcome back to purana
[old] Pakistan.”
Mr Khan’s last day was a dramatic one.
He had already tried various tricks to cling
on, dissolving Parliament and calling fresh
elections to dodge a no-confidence vote on
April 3rd. The Supreme Court ruled his tac-
tics unlawful, and ordered that the vote go
ahead on April 9th. Yet on the day, Mr
Khan’s colleagues carried on trying to ob-
struct it. As midnight neared with no sign
of a ballot, the Supreme Court prepared to
sit and rule the speaker in contempt. With
pressure building, the speaker resigned. A
former speaker presided over the motion
in the early hours of April 10th. When the
votes were tallied, Mr Khan’s foes had 174—two more than a simple majority.
The new prime minister is a political
dynast of precisely the sort that Mr Khan
wanted to drive out of Pakistani politics.
Shehbaz Sharif, the younger brother of Mr
Khan’s predecessor, Nawaz Sharif, runs the
main opposition party, the Pakistan Mus-
lim League-Nawaz. He lacks the charisma
of his elder sibling, or indeed the crowd-
pulling power of his niece, Maryam Nawaz
Sharif. Instead his strength lies in his repu-
tation as a competent administrator.
The son of a wealthy industrialist, Mr
Sharif worked in the family business be-
fore entering politics. While his brother
had three terms as prime minister, Sheh-baz, now 70, had three terms as chief min-
ister of the country’s most populous prov-
ince, Punjab. His first stint was cut short by
a military coup in 1999, when the army
ousted the elder Sharif as prime minister
and both brothers temporarily went into
exile. Like Nawaz, he has also been accused
of corruption. The Sharifs say the accusa-
tions are politically motivated. He is cur-
rently on bail in a money-laundering in-
vestigation. He denies wrongdoing.
Mr Sharif’s purported competence will
now be tested to its limits. At home, he will
need to get a grip on Pakistan’s crumbling
economy. Inflation is a painful 13%, partly
thanks to the war in Ukraine, and the rupee
has been on the slide for months. A bal-
ance-of-payments crisis is looming. He
must also tip-toe around the army. He will
have learned from watching his brother
that Pakistan’s politicians can get in trou-
ble if they bicker with the armed forces,
which have directly ruled the country for
about half its existence and played king-
makers the rest of the time.
Nawaz and his daughter have railed
against the generals and their meddling,
but Shehbaz (pictured) has been more con-
ciliatory. The army appears to have smiled
on his premiership. Mr Sharif will need to
apply the same approach to fixing Paki-
stan’s foreign relations. The new govern-
ment will have to patch up relations with
America, which Mr Khan damaged by sug-
gesting, without making any evidence
public, that shadowy figures in Washing-
ton were trying to push him out.I SLAMABAD
Shehbaz Sharif takes over from Imran Khan as prime minister. He faces a
daunting to-do list→Alsointhissection
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