The Opposition leaders in Pakistan on Sunday nominated Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) leader Shehbaz Sharif as their joint candidate for the post of the country’s prime minister, ARY News reported.
On the other hand, the Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf has nominated former Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi as its prime ministerial candidate. Both Sharif and Qureshi have submitted their nomination papers to the National Assembly secretariat, which were subsequently approved.
A sitting of the National Assembly will be held on April 11 to elect the new prime minister, a day after Khan was ousted from the position after he lost a no-confidence vote. A total of 174 members in the 342-member House voted in favour of the no-trust vote, two more than the required number of 172.
With the defeat in the no-confidence motion, Khan became the first prime minister in Pakistan’s history to have been ousted through a no-confidence motion. Earlier, Shaukat Aziz (2006) and Benazir Bhutto (1989) had survived no-trust votes against them.
No Pakistani prime minister has completed a full five-year term since the country became independent in 1947.
Ahead of the nomination on Sunday, Sharif congratulated Opposition leaders such as Asif Ali Zardari, Fazal-ur-Rehman, Bilawal Bhutto and members of their parties amongst others for “standing up for the Constitution”.
After the trust vote on Saturday, Sharif had promised that the new government of Pakistan would not indulge in politics of revenge.
“I don’t want to go back to bitterness of the past,” Sharif, who is the younger brother of three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif, had said. “We want to forget them and move forward. We will not take revenge or do injustice, we will not send people to jail for no reason, law and justice will take its course.”
Sharif has previously served as the chief minister of Pakistan’s Punjab province thrice in 1997, 2008 and 2013. He is the longest-serving chief minister of the province, according to The Times of India.
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