By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: For more than a week, a rumour has been moving through Pakistani media and social media: that President Asif Ali Zardari’s trip abroad was really about arranging a marriage for his son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the 38-year-old chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party. The party has now denied it twice, in effect — once flatly, and once by staying silent as an even more detailed version of the story emerged anyway.
The basic facts are not in dispute. Zardari left the country last week on what his office described only as a “private visit,” with no destination or purpose disclosed. Bilawal, a familiar face internationally from his time as foreign minister, travelled with him. From there, accounts diverge.
The earliest version of the rumor centered on Liechtenstein, the small principality between Switzerland and Austria. Reports circulating on social media and picked up by several outlets claimed Zardari had travelled there with other family members to set a wedding date, and that Bilawal’s intended bride was from Vaduz, the country’s capital. Pakistan’s Urdu-language daily Daily Ausaf published its own version, reporting that wedding preparations were already under way — without citing sources. The paper later retracted that report.
Murtaza Wahab, the mayor of Karachi and a senior party official who serves as Bilawal’s spokesman, moved to shut the story down on Saturday, August 29, posting on X: “The news story regarding Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s engagement or wedding is incorrect and unfounded.” Neither Bilawal nor anyone else in the family has commented publicly, before or since.
That denial did not end it. Days after Wahab’s post, Geo News — one of Pakistan’s largest television networks — reported a more specific account, citing an unnamed party source it described as having direct knowledge of the matter. According to that report, Zardari and Bilawal are in Vienna, not Liechtenstein, to meet the family of a prospective bride connected to the Habsburgs, Austria’s former ruling dynasty, deposed when the monarchy ended in 1918. The source claimed the two had already met her family three times in three days, and that the families planned to spend roughly 10 days together afterwards in Britain, where Bilawal’s sisters are expected to join them.
A separate report, in The Week went further and named the woman: Gloria von Habsburg, 26, whom it described as a great-granddaughter of Karl I, the last Austrian emperor, and a daughter of Archduke Karl of Austria and Francesca von Thyssen-Bornemisza. No PPP official, and no representative for the Habsburg family, has confirmed that identification.
Even setting aside which country the story places the family in, the two dominant versions can’t be reconciled. One has Zardari in Liechtenstein negotiating with a family from Vaduz. The other has him in Vienna meeting a family with historic Austrian royal ties. Both are attributed only to unnamed sources.
What holds up independently of either version is narrower. Zardari is on his first extended trip to Britain in nearly five years. Bilawal, who studied at Oxford, travels to the U.K. often for political and personal reasons alike. His aunt, Sanam Bhutto — the last surviving child of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto — is already in London, there for an unrelated family wedding.
Bilawal has addressed the subject of marriage before, lightly. Asked by a reporter in 2022 whether he had plans to marry, he laughed and said, “Of course, I have plans to marry,” without elaborating. In 2016, he said any future wife would first have to win over his sisters, calling that “a very difficult task for any girl.”
More than a week in, the story has outrun what anyone close to it will confirm on the record. The party’s denial, issued Saturday, has not been retracted. Nor has the report that followed it.
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