Senate elections: MQM presses PPP for more seats

PML-Q is also pushing the ruling party for an ambitious quota for the upper house polls.

ISLAMABAD:

There is a price to pay for coalition politics, and, sooner or later, the pound of flesh will be sought.

Like the rest of the smaller partners in the ruling alliance, Muttahida Qaumi Movement is also pressing the Pakistan Peoples Party for an ambitious share in the upcoming Senate elections.

With less than a month left for the Senate elections, scheduled for March 2, bickering on seat allocations within the ruling alliance has burgeoned – though, thus far, behind closed doors.

The smaller parties are expecting an embattled PPP to be generous – something the party feels it cannot afford. The MQM, on its part, has its own expectations: One of which involves a return gesture for its support back in 2009 to make Interior Minister Rehman Malik a senator on an upper house seat reserved from Sindh.

Of the 12 senators to be elected from the Sindh Assembly come March, the MQM is reported to be demanding four seats while the PPP has so far agreed to two.

“According to our strength in the provincial assembly, our share is minimum three seats … but we also want the PPP to return the gesture by giving an additional seat from the province on technocrat quota,” an MQM central leader told The Express Tribune.

Elections for 54 Senate seats will be held next month: Four provincial assemblies electing 12 senators each, Fata MNAs electing four and the rest of the National Assembly electing two for the federal capital quota.

The PPP has a simple majority in the 168-seat Sindh Assembly with 91 members followed by MQM’s 51. The breakaway PML-Q has 11, PML-Functional eight, National Peoples Party three and the Awami National Party two. These smaller parties are either divided internally or have a covert understanding with the PPP to support nominees for the Senate. In exchange, the PPP will either ‘accommodate’ them in terms of posts or seats in another province or in the centre.

Under this scenario, the ruling PPP is eying 10 of the 12 seats from Sindh – a target that would help its larger ambition to secure a large presence in the Upper House after the Senate elections.

However, achieving this target will not be an easy task. After all, every coalition partner has its own ambitions as well.

Aside from the MQM’s four-seat demand, the PML-Q also wants either a seat from Sindh or wants the PPP to accommodate it in one of the two seats allocated to the federal capital.

PML-Q information secretary Kamil Ali Aga went a step further. He claimed that the PPP had agreed to give his party a share in the Senate elections according to the number of seats it had won in the national and provincial assemblies at the time of 2008 elections. “We were promised a senate share according to our original count. We expect PPP to follow that formula,” he said.

In a meeting last month, parties of the ruling alliance had agreed to bring “consensus candidates”. In such a case, only the candidates allocated a party ticket will file their nominations and they would get elected unopposed.

The PPP is also negotiating with PML-N and JUI-F to adopt this procedure, which, it says, would save everyone from horse trading.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 5^th, 2012.