The ex-leader continues his showdown with the government for early elections, while the country prey to an economic crisis undergoes repeated attacks by the Taliban.
By Sophie Landrin (New Delhi, correspondent)
Imran Khan plays the policy of the earth burned at the risk of rushing Pakistan in chaos. The former Prime Minister threatens to dissolve two of the four regional assemblies on Friday, December 23, those that his party directs directly or with allies, the Pendjab and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The pendjab represents half of the Pakistani population, 110 million out of 220 million. This operation with random results is part of the showdown that the former Prime Minister has been carrying out for eight months with the government of Shehbaz Sharif to demand early elections.
The former cricket champion, ousted from power in April after the vote of a motion of distrust in Parliament, considers himself victim of a political plot and asks that the arbitrator. The government refuses to do so because its opponent enjoys phenomenal popularity. Since his departure from power, he has mobilized gigantic crowds. At the head of a walk to Islamabad, he had been the victim on November 3 of an attack. Wounded in the leg, he was forced to a forced rest.
Regional assemblies in Pakistan, four in number, have significant powers, and the organization of elections would represent a heavy process for the government, while the country is in the grip of an unprecedented, political, ecological, ecological crisis economical and safe. To justify its call to the ballot boxes, Imran Khan explains that it fears that, by October, the date scheduled for the general elections, “Pakistan does not reach a point of no return”. “The concern is that our economy is collapsing, it goes into a spin,” he said before foreign journalists.
The economy is indeed very bad, weakened by the pandemic of COVID-19, by the consequences of the war in Ukraine on the cost of energy and by the major floods of the summer of 2022, which submerged A third of the land and led to losses estimated at $ 40 billion (38 billion euros). On Wednesday, the Pakistani Prime Minister urged the international community to provide his country with the help he desperately needs. “Even today, 20 million victims of the floods need urgent humanitarian aid,” said Sharif, during a visit to the Sind province in the south of the country. The snow, as he recalled, began to fall into certain areas, adding to the difficulties of the populations.
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