Pakistan’s Military Tried Every Trick to Discredit Imran Khan, But Was Not Successful. What Now?

He has been shot, imprisoned, his political party essentially banned, and the mainstream media has stopped using his name. However, it’s impossible to contain Imran Khan.

According to preliminary results from Pakistan’s election on Thursday, independent candidates connected to Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party appear to have a chance of winning a majority of legislative seats, despite numerous anomalies that persisted until polling day and were intended to impede such an outcome.

The PTI’s renowned cricket bat insignia was already outlawed, and on Thursday, mobile networks statewide were suspended, making it more difficult for party officials to notify supporters of their chosen independent candidate in each constituency. (The administration maintained that the blackout was necessary for security, even though Pakistan’s High Court had declared such actions to be unlawful.) Furthermore, exit polls were outlawed, and the PTI claimed that their agents could not observe polling places. Former Minister of State under Khan, Zulfi Bukhari, tells TIME, “The amount of rigging going on is beyond ridiculous.”

However, when the results did eventually come in—more than ten hours later than usual, which observers find extremely suspicious—the PTI and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), led by three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, were tied for first place. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s son, came in third.

The strong military in Pakistan supports Sharif, who has been backed three times for his removal from office but was recently granted permission to return from exile in the United Kingdom, overturning his conviction for corruption and lifting his lifelong ban from politics. Sharif’s swift recovery was in sharp contrast to the PTI-Khan purge carried out by the generals.

According to Maya Tudor, an Oxford University associate professor of government and public policy, “nobody rules without the tacit support of the military.” “This time, the PTI is being targeted more overtly by the military because they have support from the grassroots and are technologically astute.”

However, there are still other barriers to forming a government, even in the unlikely event that the PTI wins a majority of legislative seats.

There is a chance of forced defections because its lawmakers, who are formally independents, are not required to vote along party lines for important appointments. Furthermore, the PTI is ineligible for its share of the 70 “reserved seats” in the National Assembly, which are allocated to women and minorities based on each party’s percentage of the total vote. In addition, Khan, 71, is still incarcerated and was ineligible to run for office as a politician. Rumors of a power-sharing agreement between the PML-N and PPP, with Zardari as president and Sharif as prime minister, were rampant even before the election. That still leaves a coalition between the two as the most likely result.

Nevertheless, the PTI’s performance is a crushing blow to Pakistan’s military, which had supported Khan prior to his election triumph in 2018. But the generals had a terrible falling out with the former captain of the national cricket team and orchestrated his removal in a no-confidence vote in April 2022. Since then, Khan has withstood over 180 court challenges, including an attempt on his life. He was sentenced to 31 years in prison for corruption, disclosing state secrets, and being married in a “un-Islamic” marriage just in the last few weeks.

Even yet, he continued to have high support in the run-up to the election, particularly from younger Pakistanis, who made up 45% of the country’s electorate (about 130 million). “The fact that PTI surpassed expectations is definitely a big blow,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute. “It’s very clear that the military was nervous.”

The Pakistani public and political elite are currently awaiting the whole results and anticipate further horse-trading. The 240 million-person nuclear-armed nation cannot afford a leadership void, and whoever wins the top position will undoubtedly face many challenges. The highest rate of inflation in Asia, which hit 29.7% year over year in December, is a source of pain for Pakistanis. Thanks to a $3 billion IMF loan, the South Asian country just narrowly avoided a sovereign default last summer. A new agreement by next month is considered necessary to prevent economic disaster.

Pakistan’s border security situation is becoming more and more precarious. Islamabad has recently lost favor with Kabul due to cross-border terrorist assaults and Pakistan’s expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees, many of whom have been residents of the nation for decades, despite the country’s close historical links to the Afghan Taliban. Additionally, Pakistan and Iran traded small-scale airstrikes on suspected militant sites located on one other’s soil last month. Furthermore, Islamabad has severed ties with its longstanding adversary to the east by accusing India of conducting an assassination campaign inside its borders.

Furthermore, given the dire situation of the economy, it is unclear how PTI supporters will respond to their disenfranchisement, even if Pakistan’s military persists in its efforts to remove the party from office. PTI supporters trashed military property on May 9 in retaliation for Khan’s brief previous incarceration. Even though he’s still in prison, Thursday’s election demonstrates that the sports legend’s political career is far from over.

According to Kugelman, “the military clearly hoped it could put the Imran Khan genie back in the bottle by having him in jail for a few years,” and it wants the next government to concentrate on economic recovery. “However, the difficulties will only increase as the PTI base’s resentment grows.”