Pakistanis have labelled it a “selection” – not an election. Human rights monitors have condemned it as neither free nor fair.

As voters headed to the polls Thursday, the influence of Pakistan’s powerful military and the turbulent state of its politics were on full display. Few doubted which party would come out on top, a reflection of the generals’ ultimate hold on Pakistan’s troubled democracy.

But the military is facing new challenges to its authority from a discontented public, making this an especially fraught moment in the nation’s history.

The tension was underlined Thursday (Feb 8) as Pakistan’s Interior Ministry announced that it had suspended mobile phone service across the country because of the security situation. Some analysts in Pakistan cast it as an effort to keep opposition voters from getting information or coordinating activities.

The election took place in the shadow of a month’s long military campaign to gut the party of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, a former international cricket star and populist leader who was ousted by parliament in 2022 after falling out with the generals.

The crackdown was the latest dizzying swerve in the country’s roller-coaster politics.

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The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, or PMLN, the party of the three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, is expected to claim victory in Thursday’s vote. Sharif himself was ousted when he fell out of favour with the military in 2017, and Khan, with the military’s support, became prime minister a year later.

Now it is Khan who is sitting in jail after a bitter split with the military over its political control, while Sharif is apparently seen by the generals as the lone figure in Pakistan having the stature to compete with the widely popular Khan.

Voters were choosing members of provincial legislatures and the country’s parliament, which will appoint the next prime minister. The polls officially closed at 5 pm, and preliminary results were expected by late Thursday night. However, it could take up to three days for all votes to be officially counted.

It is seen as unlikely that any party will win an outright majority, meaning that the party with the largest share of seats would form a coalition government. Officially, this will be only the third democratic transition between civilian governments in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation of 240 million people.

On Thursday afternoon outside a polling station in Lahore’s Gawalmandi neighbourhood, supporters of Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, chatted as voters made their way through the winding alleyways of the old city and men smoked cigarettes on the balconies above.

The men complained that the mobile service outage had blocked them from using a PTI-sponsored app to help them find their local polling station. The ballots were also particularly confusing, they said. While other parties use a single symbol to represent all their candidates, the authorities issued an individual symbol for every PTI candidate – a move analysts said was designed to confound PTI supporters.

The military has ruled Pakistan directly through various coups or indirectly under civilian governments ever since the country gained independence in 1947. It has often meddled in election cycles to pave the way for its preferred candidates and to winnow the field of their competitors. But the military has used an especially heavy hand before this vote, analysts say, a reflection of the growing anti-military fervour in the country stoked by Khan.

The crackdown has drawn widespread condemnation from local and international human rights groups. On Tuesday, the United Nations’ top human rights body expressed concern over “the pattern of harassment, arrests and prolonged detentions of leaders.”

“We deplore all acts of violence against political parties and candidates, and urge the authorities to uphold the fundamental freedoms necessary for an inclusive and meaningful democratic process,” Liz Throssell, spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights, said at a news conference.

The intimidation campaign has come at a particularly turbulent moment in Pakistan. For months after Khan was removed from office, he railed against the country’s generals and accused them of orchestrating his ouster – a claim they reject. His direct criticism of the military was unheard-of in Pakistan. It inspired his supporters to come out in droves to vent their anger at the military for its role in his removal.

“Imran Khan is a clearest case of political engineering gone wrong; the army became the victim of its own engineering,” said Zafarullah Khan, an Islamabad-based analyst. “Now civil-military relations are being written on the streets. This is unique in Pakistan.”

After violent protests broke out in May targeting military installations, the generals responded in force. Leaders of Khan’s party, PTI, were arrested and ordered to denounce the party. PTI supporters were also swept up by the police. Khan was sentenced to a total of 34 years in prison after being convicted in four cases and barred from running in the election.

The authorities also allowed Khan’s rival Sharif, who had been living in exile for years, to return to the country. He quickly became a front-runner in the race after Pakistani courts overturned the corruption convictions that led to his ouster in 2017 and reversed his disqualification from competing in elections.

The military also sought a détente with Sharif, who has a loyal base of supporters in the country’s most populous province, Punjab, analysts say. The other major political party in Pakistan, the Pakistan People’s Party, or PPP, does not have nearly the same national appeal as PMLN.

While a PMLN victory appears certain, there are still some lingering questions about how the vote will ultimately play out. Some analysts believe the military will not allow Sharif to become prime minister, given his contentious history with the generals. The military may instead seek to elevate his brother, former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who is much more deferential to the army but less popular with the public.

It is also possible that despite the crackdown, PTI voters came out in large numbers Thursday, raising the possibility that the military could tamper with the vote count, the analysts said. If the military did so, that could spark protests. nytimes