Pakistan Election Update: Early Results Suggests Sweeping Opposition Victory
Pakistan’s opposition parties were poised to win parliamentary elections as voters sought an end to President Pervez Musharraf’s eight years of military rule.
“It seems, according to predictions, that the opposition has won,” Tariq Azeem, a spokesman for the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-i-Azam, said by telephone from the capital, Islamabad.
Early results from the 64,000 polling booths showed that the two major political groups — the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party and former prime minister Mohammad Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League — could gain control of two- thirds of the parliament’s seats. That would give them government control and the mandate to reverse constitutional changes that have kept Musharraf in power since a 1999 military coup.
