LET’S imagine there’s a plan. Let’s push this a bit and imagine that it’s largely being implemented. A five-year term designed to undo past follies and set a base. The next term for take-off.

This is a 10-year project at a minimum. If one subscribes to the overall framework, the first five are supposed to be painful. Global commodity prices are making it even more so. Let’s momentarily forget about the fact that progress on some of the other base-building things (energy, innovation, technology transfer, labour upgradation) is largely absent. Instead, we’ll take the PR statements at face value and move on to ponder over the actual politics of it.

Pakistan’s return to democracy is now in its 13th year. There’s still a rudimentary commitment to the Constitution, in so far that elections have to be held. This is a pretty big change in its own right. Sure elections can be managed, cajoled, and nudged in various ways, but at the end of the day, anonymity in the polling booth can still produce surprising results.

This is the challenge that the incumbent currently faces. If it believes it’s putting in the hard work in this five-year term, then its pathway to reaping the reward in the next five goes through another electoral victory. This is where things start to appear a little bleak/interesting, depending on one’s affinity.

Is the incumbent on track for a repeat? After recent events and general trends, it’s looking a bit tight right now.

The PTI currently has 123 directly elected members in the National Assembly (NA). That’s nearly twice as much as the main opposition party (PML-N with 65). The difference in votes polled was around 25 per cent which shows the current ruling party won a lot more efficiently. Looking at the map from 2018, it’s also quite clear that the PTI has cultivated electoral support far more widely than any other party in the recent past.

The PTI being the most popular national party is not a contestable fact. Its main competitors remain confined to regions with a few pockets outside of their base. The PTI on the other hand is ruling in two provinces and is still the single largest party in the largest city of the country. It is also true that in terms of basic favourability polling around a national leader, Imran Khan is still ahead of his main rivals.

With these facts in place, one could argue there’s little to worry about for 2023. The 10-year plan remains on track.

However, it’s worth paying attention to the fact that the electoral edifice for the government is still quite fragile.

The flip side of winning efficiently and widely in a number of areas except central Punjab is that the margins are fairly thin. This reflects itself in the overall current composition of the NA, where the PTI remains reliant on unreliable partners (the GDA, PML-Q, and periodically, the MQM). It’s even thinner in Punjab. Simply put, returning to office in the same handicapped manner requires at least a repeat of 2018. The way that Pakistan’s electoral geography and population distribution works is that sweeping KP, north Punjab, south Punjab, and picking up a considerable share in Karachi results in the PTI being the single largest party with a plurality (not even a majority).

Is the incumbent on track for a repeat? After recent events and general trends, it’s looking a bit tight right now. If the JUI-F’s resurgence in the KP local body polls, worrying for both the incumbent and for anyone invested in changing things for the better more generally, holds on, it means the PTI loses a bit of ground in its electoral stronghold. That’s chink number one in the armour.

Read: JUI-F’s surprise win likely to reshape KP’s political landscape

If the cantonment board elections in Punjab were anything to go by, it means the PTI is also losing ground in north Punjab — a region that it swept in 2018 (nine out of 13 NA seats with two more going to allies), and — what often goes under the radar — made extremely good gains even back in 2013. Losing ground in north Punjab means ceding some of those nine NA wins to either the opposition or to unreliable independents/allies. That’s chink number two.

The third key region is south Punjab. Helped by party-hopping electables, the PTI bagged 29 out of 45 seats, with an additional one falling to a PML-Q ally. The year 2018 also marked a re-entry by the PPP in the region, and the PML-N’s holding on to some of its vote-share in the Bahawalpur belt. There’s no good survey or electoral data to rely on here except for a recent by-election win by the PML-N in Khanewal, but if general sentiment and anecdotal accounts are anything to go by, inflation is likely to have dented the value of a PTI ticket. This could either mean another round of independents winning, or the opposition gaining some ground on its own. Either way, matching 2018 numbers is going to be a challenge. Not an insurmountable one, given the indirect nature of politics that relies on local bigwigs, but a difficult one nonetheless. That’s chink number three.

Lastly, there is Karachi. The task here is fairly simple — the PTI needs to match its 2018 performance of winning 13 out of 21 seats and emerge as the single biggest party in the city. There’s little to suggest that it won’t be possible — the MQM isn’t consolidating its old vote bank and the PPP has made no progress in Mohajir areas. The possible spoiler here is the TLP, and no one knows how that’s going to turn out. It could very well be chink number four.

Dropping seats in any of these key regions and still hoping to return as the single largest party means winning in central Punjab, rural Sindh, and southern Balochistan to compensate. As things stand, that seems like a far bigger ask and gives the ruling party a lot to think about over the next year and a half.

The writer teaches politics and sociology at Lums.

Twitter: @umairjav

Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2021