Author Topic: Pakistan Opposition Leads as Voters Reject Musharraf  (Read 1558 times)

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Offline Wretched Excess

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Pakistan Opposition Leads as Voters Reject Musharraf
« on: February 19, 2008, 12:21:03 AM »
Pakistan Opposition Leads as Voters Reject Musharraf

 Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- 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.

``There has been an anti-incumbency swing, and it looks like it's of a big magnitude,'' said Haris Gazdar, a Pakistani political and economic researcher at the London School of Economics.

With 179 of 272 constituencies reported, the parties of Bhutto and Sharif each held 56 seats, according to the independent GEO Television's Web site. With the secular Awami National Party, which is a possible coalition partner for the two larger parties, the anti-Musharraf bloc holds two-thirds of the parliament seats declared. The bulk of the results from Bhutto's stronghold, Sindh province, have not been reported.

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