Musharraf likely to remain in power

Opponents of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf seemed unlikely tonight to have won enough parliamentary seats to remove him from power.

With the count in Monday’s elections nearly complete, the parties of two ex-prime ministers, the murdered Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, have done enough to form a new government, but appeared to be falling short of the two-thirds needed to impeach the president.

So far, they have won 154 of the 268 contested seats, according to the Election Commission, with just six results still to be announced. The various parties have already begun discussions on forming a coalition government, likely to be led by Bhutto’s party.

The result is seen as a major political setback for Mr Musharraf, a key ally of the West in fighting the Taliban and al Qaida, whose popularity has plummeted over the past year. The victors were secular political parties; Islamic hard-liners fared badly.

US President George Bush, the Pakistani leader’s chief foreign backer, declared that the elections were fair and were a “victory in the war on terror".

“It’s now time for the newly elected folks to show up and form their government,” Mr Bush said. “The question then is ’Will they be friends of the US?’ I certainly hope so.”

The new government, expected to be installed by mid-March, will determine how to tackle the country’s formidable challenges, including rising prices and the threat from Islamic extremism.

Pakistan’s new leaders must also decide how to deal with Mr Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup and went on to become a key ally in the war on terror, an unpopular decision in the Muslim nation of 160 million.

His spokesman said yesterday that the president intends to work with the new government and will serve out his term which expires in 2012, rejecting opposition calls for him to resign.

But Mr Musharraf’s decisions to suspend the constitution, purge the judiciary and round up political opponents sent his approval ratings plummeting, and the sound defeat suffered by the pro-Musharraf PML-Q party was widely seen as a repudiation of the president.

Mr Sharif, who has already called on the president to resign, said today: “I think Musharraf should understand that the situation is out of his control.”

In Lahore, the leader of a group of dissident lawyers warned of street demonstrations in the capital Islamabad unless judges removed by Mr Musharraf last year are reinstated by March 9, the anniversary of the president’s crackdown on the judiciary.

“If parliament thinks they are going to ignore it, the lawyers of Pakistan are not going to ignore it … We will march on Islamabad from all directions,” Aitzaz Ahsan, president of the Pakistan Supreme Court Bar Association, said.

Mr Sharif is expected to meet soon with Asif Ali Zardari, leader of Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party, which won the most seats and is now discussing with various political leaders the possibility of forming a broad-based coalition government.

Mr Zardari said yesterday he wanted to form a “government of national unity.” He made clear that he would not include politicians who had been allied with Mr Musharraf, but carefully avoided an unequivocal statement about whether the president should remain in power.

However, the former general is so unpopular among the Pakistani public that opposition parties are likely to find little reason to work with him, particularly since he no longer controls the powerful army.

At best, Mr Musharraf faces the prospect of remaining in power with sharply diminished powers even if the opposition fails to muster the two-thirds support in parliament to impeach him.