PREVIEW: Pakistan lawmakers get ready to choose a new president

Sep 5, 2008, 15:27 GMT

Islamabad (dp) - Pakistani lawmakers were electing a new president Saturday to replace former head of the state Pervez Musharraf who resigned to avoid impeachment in the parliament on August 18.

Asif Ali Zardari - widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto who heads her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) after her assassination last year - is expected to win the presidential race against the two other candidates.

'I don't think Mr Zardari will have any trouble in winning the elections as we have already secured more than 450 of 702 votes in the Presidential Electoral College,' said Information Minister Sherry Rehman.

A presidential candidate, who is obliged to be a Muslim, is elected not through a general vote but a complicated system of secret ballot by the two houses of the parliament - 342-member National Assembly, the lower house, and the 100-seats Senate, the upper house - and four provincial assemblies.

Altogether, 1,170 legislatives cast their ballots but not each vote has the same value. Each member of the two houses of the parliament has one vote and so does the every lawmaker of the assembly in the smallest province of Balochistan, which has 65 seats.

But for the rest of the three provincial assemblies every member's vote will be multiplied by 65 and then divided by the total number of members in the house it belongs to get the actual value of the vote.

Zardari is expected to get majority votes in the all four provincial assemblies except the one in Punjab, the largest province, where his former coalition partner and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League -Nawaz (PML-N) dominates.

He is also set to certainly win the race in lower house of the parliament.

Zardari's party won February 18 elections by defeating Musharraf's political allies but could not get the simple majority to form the government, which it did by forming an alliance with Sharif's party.

But the coalition broke down last month when the two differed on the issue of the restoration of judges purged by Musharraf under an emergency order on November 3, leading the country into a further political uncertainty.

Zardari, generally a liberal minded though publicly perceived as a corrupt leader, seems to have emerged as the best ally for the western countries after Musharraf's replacement in the international fight against terrorism.

He is believed to be in close contacts with the officials in Washington and has publicly vowed to adopt hard-handed policy towards Taliban militants in country's tribal areas, from where they launch cross border attacks on international forces in Afghanistan.

'We stand with the United States, Britain, Spain and others who have been attacked,' he wrote in a column for The Washington Post on Thursday. 'Fundamentally, however, the war we our fighting is our war. This battle is for Pakistan's soul.'

Nevertheless, as he tries to ensure United States of his loyalty, he also accommodated Islamic religious parties and the lawmakers from tribal areas by approving a unilateral ceasefire with the Taliban during the holy month of Ramazan.

The move has triggered border tensions in recent days between international forces deployed in Afghanistan and Islamabad. US special forces carried out a pre-dawn raid in Pakistani tribal district of South Waziristan on Wednesday, killing 20 people, including women and children.

On the following day, six more died as a missile allegedly fired from a US drone hit a house in the neighboring North Waziristan. Five, including three children and two women were killed, in the third US attack on the row in tribal areas on Saturday.

The situation would be very challenging for Zardari once he becomes the president.

On the one hand he would be expected by Pakistani public to country's territorial integrity and on the other his western allies would be dictating him to do more against the militants, something which was one reason for Musharraf's unpopularity and eventual fall.