PPP man and Bhutto loyalist Fahim frontrunner for PM’s post

Senior PPP leader and Bhutto loyalist Makhdoom Amin Fahim was the frontrunner to become Pakistan’s next prime minister...

Senior PPP leader and Bhutto loyalist Makhdoom Amin Fahim was the frontrunner to become Pakistan’s next prime minister, a day after the two major opposition parties and once bitter rivals decided to stitch a new governing coalition.

The newly elected Parliamentarians of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) met on Friday for the first time after it emerged as the single largest party and unanimously authorised party’s co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari to choose the prime ministerial candidate.

According to PPP sources tonight, no final decision has been taken and that an announcement of the party’s nominee to head the coalition of PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N was unlikely any time now.

Story continues below this ad

Fahim(68), who is PPP’s vice-chairman, was the public face in slain premier Benazir Bhutto’s cabinet. Sources in both PPP and PML-N said the widely respected PPP leader was a leading contender.

The names of PPP’s Punjab Province President and a former Federal minister Shah Mehmood Quereshi, former national Assembly speaker Yusuf Reza Gillani and firebrand lawyer and a party supporter Aitaz Ahsan were also doing the rounds for the top post.

According to reports, there was every likelihood that a formal announcement of the prime ministerial candidate and government formation could take a few days. After the PPP meeting, Zardari said it was meant to discuss the name of the new prime minister.

“We think they (PPP) will choose their best person for the job,” said PML-N spokesman Sadiq-ul-Farooq after Sharif’s party made it clear that the new premier will be from the winning party.

Story continues below this ad

Zardari briefed the parliamentary party about the PPP’s dialogue with other political parties, including the PML-N and Awami National Party, to form coalition governments in the centre and provinces. “I am looking for a broader national conesnsus government,” he had said on Thursday.

The PPP’s parliamentary parties from Punjab and North West Frontier Province will meet here tomorrow while the meetings of newly elected members of the Sindh and Balochistan assemblies will be held in Karachi on Sunday.

Zardari told the meeting that the polls were marred by “massive pre-poll rigging and selective rigging on the election day that was marked by violence, stealing of ballot papers in Sindh and Punjab and the withholding of results for manipulation in a number of constituencies”.

“The voting also shows that (President Pervez) Musharraf’s political loyalists have been completely rejected by the people of Pakistan,” he said.

Story continues below this ad

The participants vowed to work for the restoration of parliamentary supremacy “by undoing undemocratic provisions under which elected parliaments have been dismissed”, he said.