By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has decided to field candidates in every ward of all 125 union councils in Islamabad’s local government elections on 20 December.
The party’s regional leadership has told district and town organisations to file nomination papers between 2 and 6 November. The vote will be the capital’s first local election since the last councils’ term ended in February 2021.
Amir Mughal, the party’s Islamabad president, told Dawn newspaper on Wednesday: “We have decided to contest elections on all 125 seats of union councils.”
Mughal said party workers had toured the city to gather opinion and claimed “over 95 percent of people suggested contesting the elections”. The party was not deterred by the prospect of a hostile playing field, he said.
“They were of the view that the government can not do more than what it is already doing with the party,” he said. “So we will contest without going into what kind of election symbols are allotted to our candidates.”
Asked about the timetable, Mughal said the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) had already postponed the election four times. He said he feared it would do so again because of PTI’s popularity.
A press release issued by the party on Wednesday said Mughal, Shoaib Shaheen and Malik Aamir had held more than 25 meetings across the capital’s three electoral constituencies over the past three days. The decision followed online consultations with about 400 office-bearers. They came from the regional and district organisations, the eight town organisations, all 125 union councils and a range of party bodies. Those included the labour wing, Insaf Students Federation, and the youth, traders and women’s wings, as well as the advisory council, working committee and core committee. The party said 95 per cent of the office-bearers consulted backed taking part.
PTI said it would nominate candidates “committed to public service” and loyal to the political ideology of Khan, its founder. Preference would go to dedicated, principled and determined workers who had stayed at the forefront of the party’s political struggle, it said. Noting the earlier delays, it vowed to press for the polls to be held as scheduled.
The statement was sharply critical of the legal framework for the vote. PTI said the government intended to hold elections under a flawed system that left elected representatives without meaningful powers, even over basic municipal services such as street cleaning, while concentrating authority in the bureaucracy.
It also opposed a reported move to replace the direct election of chairmen and vice chairmen with an indirect process run through councillors. The party called this a potential means of pre-poll rigging and alleged that councillors could be intimidated or pressured into changing their votes. It questioned a proposal to announce results four days after polling, claiming the gap could facilitate manipulation.
It was not immediately clear whether those changes would apply. The ECP ordered this month that the capital’s local elections be held under the 2015 law and told the authorities to issue the schedule immediately.
PTI described Islamabad as traditionally one of its strongholds. It said it was confident of a sweeping win, comparable to the result it claimed in the 2024 general elections.
Under the schedule, a public notice inviting nomination papers is due on 30 October. Polling will run from 8am to 4pm on 20 December, with results to be announced between 21 and 24 December. Election symbols are due to be allocated on 26 November. Under the ECP’s guidelines, the prime minister, the president, ministers and members of parliament are barred from taking part in the campaign.
The ECP was supposed to hold elections within 120 days of the councils’ term expiring in 2021. Instead, the federal government and the commission spent the years on delimitation exercises and election schedules that were later set aside.
Polls scheduled for 31 December 2022 were postponed after the ECP dismissed as unlawful the government’s decision to raise the number of union councils from 101 to 125. A schedule issued in 2024 was suspended in September of that year, after parliament passed amendments to the local government act over PTI’s opposition. The commission later announced 15 February this year as a polling date. That vote did not take place either. The capital’s union councils have since grown in number from 50 to 101 and then 125, and the chief election commissioner remarked at a hearing on the case that the government did not wish to hold local elections in Islamabad.
PTI’s candidates have faced a further complication over symbols. When nominations were last due, in December, Mughal said PTI candidates would file under the banner of the Sunni Ittehad Council after the revocation of the party’s election symbol.
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