Pakistan had been so fearful about how election day this week would turn out that it is dangerously easy now to slip into a countdown to the country’s immense challenges. Pakistan, and all those around the world keenly scanning the results, need to stay with this moment a considerable while. Tomorrow will bring a roster of questions about government formation, its agenda, possibly its limitations. To negotiate them, the new federal and provincial governments could return to the democratic triumph today to spot the ingredient that makes them better endowed to lead Pakistan than their predecessors. This has been by all accounts one of Pakistan’s freest and fairest elections. By that virtue alone, the next government in Islamabad will have unique legitimacy. The men and women in the regime — as too other centres of the power establishment — must remember this. And those worldwide with a perceived stake in Pakistan’s stability must celebrate it.The erstwhile opposition parties — the Bhutto clan’s PPP, the Sharifs’ PML, and the mohajir MQM — have predictably done well. The politics of Pakistan is now firmly with Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. As our columnist points out, they will have to apply themselves to making the cohabitation work. But the obverse side of their probably difficult cohabitation is the rout of all the president’s men. Most spectacularly, the kingmaker of the Musharraf years, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, has lost his election. Musharraf perhaps erred tactically in predicting on election eve the victory of his political allies. Or perhaps the utterance was Freudian. He knows it is he who was up for a vote on February 18. Coming days will demand for Pakistan’s sake an order of grace and humility from him that he has so far shown no evidence of possessing.Dignity is also needed from Musharraf’s international supporters. Pakistan’s new government needs for the West to refrain from demanding the kind of schoolyard loyalty Musharraf had become so expert at iterating. The quid pro quo of that process gave Musharraf cover to make incremental distortions in Pakistan’s polity. Those in the West who cowered at the success of the extremist parties in the 2002 elections must look at the result tally. In the Frontier province, the MMA alliance has disintegrated, and the more constitutional Awami National Party, which has an understanding with the PPP, is leading. The lesson: fullest spectrum of political participation — not the dictator’s choicest contestants — keeps politics centred. And more stable.
