Pakistan’s political crisis worsens as regional governments fall

The party of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan was on Friday set to dissolve its governments in two provinces.

The move will likely deepen a political crisis in a nuclear-armed nation, also facing economic chaos.

Khan, who was ousted by the country’s parliament through a vote of no confidence in 2022, had ordered the chief minister of the central province of Punjab to step down.

Fawad Chaudhry, aide to the former prime minister, said the process of dissolving the government had begun and was set to be complete on Saturday.

The chief minister of the north-western province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa said he would also step down and dissolve the provincial legislature at the weekend.

Khan had blamed his ouster on a conspiracy hatched by his opponents with the backing by the United States because he had visited Moscow on the day Russian troops launched the invasion of Ukraine last February.

A staunch supporter of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Khan had been holding large public rallies before he was shot in the leg in an apparent assassination attempt in 2022.

His latest move appeared to be an attempt to force the central government run by Shehbaz Sharif to call fresh elections.

Pakistan, a country with a big nuclear arsenal and more than 220 million mostly young people, is faced with an economic crisis due to shrinking foreign exchange reserves, 2022 devastating floods and the global slowdown.

Analysts said political chaos would compound the economic miseries of the country, which is already on the verge of a default on its global obligations.