Pakistan appointed Anwaar-ul-haq Kakar as the caretaker prime minister Saturday to run the country and steer it toward national elections, which are to be held within 90 days.
Kakar, a member of the Pakistani Senate, represents the impoverished southwestern Baluchistan province in the lower house of Parliament and is said to be an ally of the powerful military.
The 52-year-old prime minister-designate is primarily mandated to oversee "free and transparent" elections until a new government is elected.
Outgoing Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's office said Saturday that he nominated Kakar to be his successor in consultations with Raja Riaz, the opposition leader in the National Assembly, the lower house of the parliament.
The nomination was later signed into effect by Pakistani President Arif Alvi, a formality in line with the Constitution.
Sharif dissolved the National Assembly last week as its five-year tenure ended, making it the third consecutive elected house in Pakistan's 76-year turbulent democratic history to complete its term.
The Constitution requires the Election Commission of Pakistan, or ECP, to hold federal and provincial elections by mid-November after the dissolution, but it is being widely speculated the vote could be moved to next year.
The uncertainty stems from Sharif's decision earlier this month that elections should be based on new census data, binding the ECP to redraw hundreds of electoral boundaries nationwide before setting a date for the ballot.
Legal experts have warned that holding elections beyond the 90-day deadline on any pretext would violate the Constitution and could prompt the Supreme Court to intervene.
Elections in the nuclear-armed South Asian nation of about 241 million people invariably are mired in allegations of widespread vote-rigging and other controversies, with the military often blamed for manipulating results in favor of its candidate.
Kakar, a member of the pro-military Baluchistan Awami Party, served as the chief spokesperson of the provincial government until his election to the Senate in 2018.
The elections in Pakistan likely will be held without former Prime Minister Imran Khan on the ballot. He is rated by all opinion polls as the country's most popular politician.
Last week, he was sentenced to three years in prison for alleged embezzlement of official gifts while in office and was subsequently banned from running for office for five years.
Khan has denied the graft charges as politically motivated, saying the Pakistani military is behind it to block his way to return to power. The military has denied the allegation.
Pakistan has experienced severe economic and political crises since April 2022, when Khan was removed from office by a parliamentary no-confidence vote less than four years after his party won the 2018 elections and enabled the cricket star-turned-politician to become the prime minister.
Sharif, a bitter political rival who led the vote against Khan, became the prime minister and formed a coalition government of about a dozen political parties.
Khan rejected the vote and Sharif’s ascension to power as illegal, saying the military plotted it at the behest of the United States to punish him for his neutrality in the Ukraine conflict, charges Washington and Islamabad dismissed as false.
Military generals have staged four coups in Pakistan since it gained independence from Britain in 1947, leading to several decades of dictatorial rule. The powerful institution influences political and foreign policy matters even when it is not in power, which critics blame for the country’s fragile democracy.
Source: Voice of America