By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The party of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif has become the largest in Pakistan’s parliament after securing 123 seats out of 342, following the allocation of reserved seats for women and minorities among the three parties.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), which won 75 general seats in the Feb. 8 elections and was joined by nine independents, gained 15 more seats reserved for women and one seat reserved for minorities, according to notifications issued by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Tuesday.
The commission also disqualified a coalition of religious parties that had won 91 seats with the backing of the party of former prime minister Imran Khan, saying it had not registered as a political party before the elections and had failed to submit a priority list for the reserved seats before the deadline.
The decision was a setback for Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which had hoped to increase its strength in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, ahead of a crucial presidential election, by securing some of the 60 seats reserved for women and 10 for minorities. The party will challenge the ECP decision in the high court.
The ECP allocated the remaining 23 reserved seats for women and six reserved seats for minorities among the PML-N, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P).
The PPP, the party of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, increased its tally from 68 to 73 seats, while the MQM-P, a regional party based in Karachi, maintained its 22 seats. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), another religious party, also gained four seats, bringing its total to 11.
The PML-Q, a faction of the PML-N, has five seats, while the Istehkam-i-Pakistan Party, a new entrant in the political arena, has four. Five other parties had one seat each, while nine independents did not join any party.
The ECP also uploaded key post-election documents, including the forms containing the results of the polling stations and the constituencies, on its website on Tuesday, after a delay of nearly a month that sparked allegations of vote rigging and result manipulation by the opposition parties.
The commission had faced criticism for failing to release these documents within 14 days after the elections, as required by the law, and for using a faulty electronic transmission system that caused a breakdown in the announcement of the results on election night.
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