In a significant move ahead of Sunday’s election of Pakistan’s next prime minister, PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif met Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the chief of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), a politico-religious party on Friday and sought to woo him to back a coalition government.
Nawaz Sharif, who has nominated his younger brother and president of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party, Shehbaz Sharif for the premiership, visited the residence of the cleric here.
The meeting comes ahead of the key election of the prime minister, which is set to be held on Sunday. Fazl has refused to be a part of the coalition government and expressed reservations about the results of the February 8 general elections.
A day earlier, PML-N leader Khawaja Asif said his party was still in touch with the JUI-F but refused to provide further details.
Raising serious reservations over the election results, Fazl on Thursday announced that his party would not participate in forthcoming elections for the top political slots — president, prime minister, and the National Assembly (NA) speaker.
The JUI-F, which won five National Assembly (NA), and 18 provincial assembly (PA) seats, collectively, in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), announced to stay away from being an ally of a new coalition led by the Nawaz-led PML-N party in the Centre and provinces but decided to play its parliamentary role as an opposition.
To form a government, a party must win 133 out of 265 contested seats in the 266-member National Assembly.
Independent candidates – a majority backed by 71-year-old jailed former prime minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party – won 93 National Assembly seats. The PML-N won 75 seats while the PPP came third with 54 seats. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement Pakistan (MQM-P) has 17 seats. The leadership of the PML-N and the PPP have said that they have the support of an adequate number of lawmakers to form a coalition government. Going by the election of senior PML-N leader Sardar Ayaz Sadiq as the Speaker on Friday, Shehbaz Sharif is set to become the prime minister on Sunday.