The Karachi provincial assembly. Pakistan’s four provincial assemblies vote on April 2 to elect national senators. © AP
ISLAMABAD — Members of Pakistan’s provincial and national assemblies voted on Tuesday to elect national senators amid a new set of controversies in the nation’s elections.
Polling took place for 19 out of 30 seats up for grabs. The Pakistan Peoples Party won 11, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz took 6, Muttahida Qaumi Movement won 1, and an independent candidate took one seat.
Senate polls in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly were postponed due to not all members being sworn in. Polls in the province for the remaining 11 seats will take place at a future date.
The Senate, the upper house of Parliament, has to pass all legislation before it can become law. Each of Pakistan’s four provinces elects 23 senators, and the lower house chooses another four representing the Islamabad Capital Territory, for a total of 96. Four more current seats for former tribal areas are set to expire. Senators serve six-year terms, and elections are held every three years for half of the total membership.
After the poll results, PPP is holds the lead in the chamber with 24 seats, followed by PTI 20 and PML-N 19.
This time around, there was not much of an election. Candidates for over one-third of the open seats — 18 out of the 48 — have already been elected unopposed: all 11 senators from Balochistan and seven from Punjab. And in the Sindh assembly, 12 senators will be elected unopposed after the opposition party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) boycotted the polls.
“This is the first time in the history of Pakistan that so many senators have been elected unopposed throughout the country,” Abdul Jabbar Nasir, an election analyst based in Karachi, told Nikkei Asia.
In the fourth provincial assembly — Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — there is a controversy brewing, causing a delay in its Senate elections. Its assembly is controlled by the PTI, the party of former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
Currently, the PTI is the largest party in the Senate, while Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s PML-N holds the most seats in the National Assembly.
In the Feb. 8 elections, the PTI won a landslide victory in the province but faced a setback when the Election Commission of Pakistan ruled that the party would not get any of the 26 seats reserved for women and minorities because its candidates had run without a symbol in the polls. Those seats were allocated to the opposition instead. This situation has led to a delay in the the province’s Senate elections because the assembly’s PTI-affiliated speaker has not sworn in those opposition members, contrary to the election commission’s requirement for a complete assembly to hold polls.
Experts believe that just like in the February elections, the Senate elections have become controversial, which will erode the credibility of the upper house.
Tahir Naeem Malik, a professor of international relations at the National University of Modern Languages (NUML) in Islamabad, told Nikkei that the events in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have made the Senate elections very controversial. “The Senate is an important body for legislation in Pakistan, and this controversy will result in erosion of public trust in this body,” he added.
A series of controversies relating to elections in recent months have increased public distrust in Pakistan’s political system.
“The way Senate elections are taking place this time, the Senate will become weak and will not be in a position to hold government accountable,” Islamabad resident Mujtaba Noor told Nikkei.
“Since 2008, the political system of Pakistan had developed a consensus on the continuity of Parliament, which has been broken due to the events of the last year,” said Malik from NUML. “The current Senate election controversy will contribute to the disruption of the political order in Pakistan.”
Election analyst Nasir concurred. “The entire electoral system has badly disappointed people in Pakistan,” he said. “People question the credibility of the electoral system after blatant interference in the election process.”
Marred by controversy and with the majority of senators elected without opposition, Pakistan’s triennial Senate elections will conclude a tumultuous election season that started with general elections in February and was followed by the presidential election in March.
The political crisis in Pakistan started when Khan was ousted as prime minister in April 2022. In 2023, Khan’s party faced a crackdown from the government, and he has been imprisoned since August after being convicted of corruption.
In the Feb. 8 polls, PTI-backed candidates scored an unexpected victory despite facing a crackdown and even after results for many seats were allegedly rigged against them.