Elections 2013 Who will be voting and which representative bodies are involved?

Elections 2013

1. Who will be voting and which representative bodies are involved?

Elections are scheduled during the first half of 2013 – most likely, April or May – for the National Assembly, which is the lower house of the federal parliament in Pakistan and the key legislative chamber. It currently has 342 seats. These seats are allocated to each of the country’s four provinces, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) on the basis of population, as set out in the 1998 census.¹ 60 seats in the National Assembly are reserved for women and 10 seats for non-Muslims. After the elections are over, the Prime Minister and President will then be elected by the members of the National Assembly.

Elections are also scheduled, again on the basis of a ‘first past the post’ system, for members of four unicameral provincial assemblies in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan respectively. All of them also have reserved seats for women and non-Muslims. The Chief Minister of the province will formally be appointed by the federally-appointed Governor of the province, not by the provincial assembly, but the appointee will be the person who the assembly deems to have the confidence of a majority of its members.

However, there will be no elections for the upper house of the federal parliament, the 104-member Senate, in 2013. The role of the Senate is to promote national cohesion and harmony and to counteract the domination of any one province. Half the seats in the Senate come up for re-election every three years, with the most recent elections taking place in 2012 and the next due in 2015.

There will also be no elections in 2013 to the National Assembly in the regions of Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir.² Neither is included in the territory of Pakistan under the Constitution, on the grounds that their status cannot be regularized because they are considered part of the protracted dispute with India over Kashmir. As a result, neither is represented in the National Assembly. In addition, there will be no provincial elections for the FCT, FATA, Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir – although Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir do have their own directly elected legislative assemblies operating to a different electoral cycle. Many consider that each of these areas remains effectively subject to direct federal rule.³

During the second half of 2012, there was growing debate about whether to hold local government elections at the same time as the federal and provincial polls. The previous electoral mandates of local councils have been allowed to expire without much of a political outcry. In the end, it was decided not to hold them simultaneously. They will be held afterwards at a time yet to be agreed.⁴

The number of Pakistanis registered to vote in elections in 2013 as at August 2012 was 84.4 million – this out of a population of 177 million.⁵ About half of those entitled to vote will be between 18 and 35 years old.⁶ Thumb-tracing technology will be used in order to prevent counterfeit voting. For a while it looked as if Pakistanis overseas would have a vote for the first time in the elections. The proposal was shelved for logistical reasons but the Supreme Court has said that they should be allowed to vote. However, as it currently stands, Pakistanis overseas will be able to vote only if they travel to Pakistan to do so. Neither registration nor voting is currently compulsory. Federal and provincial candidates are constitutionally prohibited from holding dual nationality.

The reservation of seats for women means that, at just over 16%, Pakistan has the highest percentage of women national and provincial parliamentarians amongst the countries of South Asia.⁷ However, as stated above, there is a major problem of relatively low female voter registration and turn-out in elections – and the rate of participation by women has actually declined significantly since the late 1980s.⁸ In the final electoral rolls for the forthcoming elections, men reportedly exceed women by almost 25%.⁹ Women are often prevented from registering to vote or voting by male family members, and, when allowed to do so, told how to vote.

2. The 2008 election results

The elections led to a coalition government headed by the two main ‘anti-military’ parties, the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), at the federal level. At provincial level, several different parties came out on top and formed governments.

The coalition government did not last long after the elections, as traditional rivalries between the PPP and the PML-N resurfaced. In May 2008, the PML-N withdrew from the government, leading to the creation of a PPP-led Government that has remained in place – sometimes precariously – since then. Musharraf, who had hoped to stay on as a ‘civilian president’, eventually stood down in August 2008, and was replaced by Benazir’s controversial widower, Asif Ali Zardari.

Below are two tables that set out the number of seats won by the main political parties in the National Assembly following the February 2008 elections and provide a list of the governments that subsequently emerged at the federal and provincial levels.

The PPP is currently the largest single party in the upper house of the federal parliament, the Senate, with 41 seats out of a total of 104. The Federal Government as a whole enjoys a comfortable majority. The PML-N is the largest opposition party, with 14 seats.

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