Pakistan’s Parliament Gives Prime Minister the Boot
No confidence vote ends Imran Khan’s populist-nationalist reign after almost four years.
Parker Song/Getty
Pakistan’s parliament voted to remove Prime Minister Imran Khan in a dramatic late-night session—eliminating one of the most prominent leaders in the nationalist wave that has swept the globe in the past decade.
The India-based Hindustan Times reported that 174 of the 342-member National Assembly voted in favor of the no-confidence measure, ending Khan’s three-and-a-half-year-old government. Early reports in other Indian media indicate that the body will replace him as soon as Monday.
Having lost his allies in the country’s military and courts, Khan unsuccessfully sought to dissolve parliament last week to prevent his ouster, and baselessly blamed the effort to remove him on an American conspiracy. But the nation’s highest tribunal slapped down his last grasps at power, and his parliamentary allies’ last-minute attempt to block the no-confidence vote failed, spurring the resignations of top officials and the continuation of the proceedings.
Khan was born wealthy, and gained fame as captain of the national cricket team, but was never part of Pakistan’s traditional political elite. Despite institutional support from the military, he rose to the country’s highest civilian political post in 2018 by campaigning as a populist outsider and enemy of the country’s endemic corruption. He had first entered the National Assembly in 2002, serving until 2007, and re-entered the body in 2013.
But he struggled to govern the South Asian nation—the fifth most populous on Earth—and inflation and unemployment spiraled under his administration. The “Pandora Papers” leak of 2021 revealed that, despite his good government promises, members of his cabinet had ducked taxes through overseas shell companies. Pakistan grew closer to China and Russia during his reign, alienating its own U.S.-friendly generals, the most powerful force in Pakistani politics.
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Pakistan declared itself “neutral” amid the Ukraine crisis, and abstained from a vote on Thursday to remove Russia from the United Nations Human Rights Council: a move that ironically mirrored the position of India, the nation’s historic arch-rival.
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