On Wednesday, elections were conducted for 37 seats in the 96-member Pakistani Senate, the upper house of the country’s Parliament, and saw the participation of lawmakers of the provinces and the members of the lower house. While the results for the election are expected to be released later today, the Election Commission’s unofficial reports suggest that Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party suffered “a key defeat in the National Assembly”. Preliminary results show that former PM Yousuf Raza Gilani defeated the country’s finance minister, Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, with the pair contesting for the Islamabad general seat.
Despite this setback, the PTI made the largest gains in this election, with its seats increasing from 14 to 18. Nevertheless, the opposition coalition is likely to retain control over the Senate, with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PLM-N) securing 20 and 18 seats each. This, combined with the seats secured by their allies, brings the opposition up to 53 seats in the upper house.
While the result was close, with Gilani securing 169 votes compared to Shaikh’s 164, the defeat indicated that either members or allies of the PTI defected in the vote, as they had 181 members in the National Assembly. This ambiguity is due to the fact that the elections were conducted through secret ballots, allowing individual members to go against the party’s decision without being identified.
Just last week, the Khan-led government had sought to mandate open ballots during the Senate elections to avoid such defection by party members and allies. This issue has been the centre of several controversies in Pakistan, with numerous allegations of bribery and horse-trading being floated against party members who often defect on secret ballots. In fact, in 2018, Imran Khan had expelled 20 members from the PTI for this very reason. However, the Pakistani Supreme Court rejected the petition by Khan’s government, saying that secret ballots were mandated as per the country’s constitution.
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Following the unofficial announcement of the result, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said, “Imran Khan and his party have made a unanimous decision that [the prime minister] will seek a vote of confidence from this house … And it will be clear who stands where. Those who stand with Imran Khan, they will be visible, and those who are not standing with him, or those who think that they prefer the ideology of [the opposition], then they have every right to clearly join their ranks.” This decision makes Imran Khan the first Pakistani leader to wilfully go and face a vote of confidence before the country’s Parliament. Qureshi further added that Gilani’s victory evidenced the failure of the Election Commission to “ensure transparency in the Senate polls.”