New political party

Former finance minister Miftah Ismail has confirmed that he is forming a new political party with former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and former human rights minister Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar. While some insiders kept suggesting that the PML-N’s leadership was still trying to keep their former prime minister from formally leaving the party, others suggested the decision was already made, and it was only a matter of timing and that Abbasi did not want to ‘make a scene’ while leaving, despite his dissatisfaction at several recent internal and external decisions by the party’s top leadership.

Critics can fairly question whether this new party can actually make an electoral splash. Of the party’s founding fathers, only Abbasi has ever won a direct election. Khokhar has been losing elections in Islamabad for over 20 years with the PML-Q and PPP. Miftah is still new to the game, with less than a decade of election losses under his belt, all with PML-N. But despite their failures at the ballot box, Khokhar and Miftah have both made commendable contributions to the public sphere. Khokhar has been quite vocal and politically balanced about human rights and individual rights-related issues, even when he has not been associated with a political office. Meanwhile, almost all the criticism directed at Miftah was political — he took tough, politically unpopular but practically necessary decisions that almost all his predecessors and successors have been unwilling to because they were more interested, in Miftah’s words, in “palace intrigues”.

Another selling point is how the party is positioning itself as a ‘big tent’ which will promote young people and encourage internal democracy through term limits to make sure it does not turn into the Bhutto party, the Sharif party, or, for that matter, the Imran Khan party. But even with internal democracy and a desire to work as a true national party, it remains to be seen whether they will be able to resist a Faustian bargain if one is forthcoming.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2024.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.