Campaign posters for Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s former prime minister, along a street ahead of Pakistan’s national election in Lahore, Pakistan, on Friday, Feb. 2, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared victory on Friday in the country’s 2024 General Election, one that many Pakistanis and human rights groups are decrying as neither free nor fair.
Sharif, 74, cited the Election Commission of Pakistan in saying that his party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), had won the largest share of the national vote. Multiple media reports said that independent candidates, backed by imprisoned ex-PM Imran Khan, were actually leading at the midway point of the vote-counting process.
Polls closed Thursday at 5 p.m. local time after a day of voting that was marred by militant attacks and charges of electoral misconduct. The vote counting was hit by long delays with the Election Commission ordering the immediate release of the results in the early hours of Friday morning after more than 10 hours of waiting.
Men wait for their turn to cast a vote at a polling station during the general election in Karachi, Pakistan February 8, 2024.
Akhtar Soomro | Reuters
The election, voting for which began the morning of Feb. 8, comes at an especially turbulent time for the country of 240 million. Known for its decades of volatile politics involving assassinations, imprisonments and military coups, Pakistan is now in the throes of an economic crisis and its largest party has been banned from running in the election.
The country’s 2024 leadership contest is “easily one of the most blatant in terms of the degree of interference by the military,” Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, practice head for South Asia at Eurasia Group, told CNBC on Thursday.
“Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will almost certainly win,” Chaudhuri said as the polls opened. “But he will come in as a remarkably illegitimate government as far as the broader public is…
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