ISLAMABAD – PML-N President Shehbaz Sharif has been elected as 24th Prime Minister of Pakistan by securing 201 votes on Sunday.
PTI and SIC backed candidate Omer Ayub Khan got 92 votes, NA speaker Ayaz Sadiq announced.
Polling has begun in the newly-elected National Assembly of Pakistan to elect the country’s new Prime Minister.
The candidates in the running are Omar Ayub Khan from the Sunni Ittehad Council and Shehbaz Sharif, the candidate of a multi-party alliance. The Assembly session was delayed by almost an hour and began at 12 pm.
Both candidates filed their nomination papers, which were accepted by Speaker Ayaz Sadiq after scrutiny. Shehbaz, the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz president, is supported by the Pakistan Peoples Party, Muttahida Qaumi Movement, Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid and Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party. His name was put forward as part of a power-sharing formula between PMLN and PPP after the elections.
In the National Assembly, independents, including those backed by the PTI, hold the largest group with 101 seats, followed by PMLN with 75 seats and PPP with 54 seats. Most PTI candidates elected to the house have chosen to join the SIC to be recognized as a party in the Assembly. The party hopes it can receive reserved seats through this strategy.
The voting for the Prime Minister is not carried out through a secret ballot like it is for the speaker or deputy speaker. Instead, the election takes place through an open division of members in the house. The entire process is laid out in Chapter IV and Second Schedule of Rules and Procedure for the Conduct of Business in the National Assembly 2007.
The speaker will first order bells to be rung for five minutes to announce that the election is about to take place. This is done to allow any members not inside the hall to make their way back.
A different lobby will be allocated for each candidate’s voters to gather in. A teller will be posted at the entrance to each lobby to record the names and division numbers of the members. The tellers will mark them on their division list.
After the speaker announces that the voting is completed, the lists from all tellers will be collected for final counting. After this, the bells will be rung again to allow the members to return to the Assembly, after which the results will be announced.
