MANY politicians after losing in elections immediately called for an all parties conference to make a grand opposition alliance without even challenging polls result in several cases.

Disgruntled party heads huddled together on one platform and started making fiery speeches seemingly to reject election the result, assuming people will come out and support them.

But cracks appeared between the alliance on some issues. Later, they rejected the idea of staying away from oath-taking. Instead, they announced they would build a strong opposition in the assembly. People were disappointed to see an alliance among the parties with divergent manifestos. A few days ago, they were against each other.

Consensus developed among the grand opposition alliance on four positions — prime minister, speaker, deputy speaker of the National Assembly and the leader of the opposition. As usual, the PPP played its trump card by taking into confidence other leaders and nominated Shahbaz Sharif as prime minister, Khursheed Shah as speaker, deputy speaker from JUI-F and most probably Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari will be the leader of the opposition.

Foreseeing that by all means Shahbaz Sharif cannot get the desired votes to become the prime minister and probably will also lose Punjab, the PPP agreed on this formula.

The PPP will surely get a level playing field in the National Assembly and their position will be strong, keeping in view the opposition leader and the speaker will be from the same party. It also has a strong position in the Senate. This will help the PPP create obstacles for legislation by government.

Asif Ali Khan
Karachi

Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2018