Pakistan has spent the last week approaching what should, in principle, be a fairly ordinary event in a parliamentary democracy: a prime minister may no longer possess the confidence of parliament.
The reality has become anything but ordinary.
Prime Minister Imran Khan faces a no-confidence motion brought by opposition parties that believe they now possess enough votes to remove him. Several members of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf have turned against the government, and crucial coalition allies have withdrawn support. Khan has responded by mobilising supporters outside parliament, accusing his opponents of corruption and presenting the attempt to remove him as part of a much larger struggle over Pakistan’s sovereignty.
At an enormous rally in Islamabad last Sunday, Khan claimed there was a foreign-backed effort to remove his government and displayed a letter that he said provided evidence of external interference. His government has increasingly suggested that foreign powers, particularly the United States, are unhappy with Pakistan’s independent foreign policy. Washington has rejected allegations that it is involved in an effort to remove him.
There may be legitimate questions about foreign diplomatic pressure, and evidence should be examined carefully rather than dismissed simply because a politician under pressure is making the allegation.
But something more important is happening underneath the conspiracy argument.
Pakistan is confronting a test that every parliamentary democracy eventually has to pass: can a political leader distinguish losing power from the political system becoming illegitimate?
Those are not the same thing.
Imran Khan became prime minister after the 2018 election, when PTI emerged as the largest party in the National Assembly and formed a coalition government. He did not receive a permanent mandate to govern until the next election regardless of what happened inside parliament. Pakistan has a parliamentary system. A prime minister remains in office because they command the confidence of the legislature.
If enough legislators withdraw that confidence, the government can fall.
That is not automatically a coup.
It is one of the mechanisms through which parliamentary government works.
This distinction matters because political leaders naturally experience institutional defeat as personal injustice. From Khan’s perspective, opposition parties attempting to remove him include politicians he has spent years describing as corrupt representatives of an old political establishment. Some legislators who previously supported his government are now defecting. Coalition partners are abandoning him when his position becomes weaker.
It probably feels deeply unfair.
Politics frequently is.
But democracy does not guarantee that politicians lose only under circumstances they consider fair.
It provides rules for determining who possesses authority when politicians disagree.
That may be the most important function institutions perform.
They convert disputes that could otherwise become existential into procedures.
Who governs?
Count the votes.
Who wins an election?
Count the ballots.
Was a law constitutional?
Ask the courts.
The answer may still be contested, but political actors have agreed in advance on a mechanism for producing one.
The system becomes dangerous when politicians accept those mechanisms only when they expect to win.
This is not a uniquely Pakistani problem. Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 US election result demonstrated how quickly a politician can shift an argument from “the other side defeated me” to “the process through which they defeated me cannot be legitimate.”
The distinction is enormously consequential.
A politician who loses can run again.
A politician who convinces supporters that the system itself is fraudulent creates a much harder problem because every future defeat can be interpreted through the same framework.
Pakistan’s institutional history makes this particularly sensitive.
No prime minister in Pakistan’s history has completed a full five-year term. Governments have fallen through military coups, presidential dismissals, judicial interventions, resignations and political crises. The military has governed Pakistan directly for substantial periods and has remained one of the country’s most powerful institutions even during civilian rule.
That history means suspicions about political manipulation cannot simply be dismissed as paranoia.
Pakistan’s democracy has genuinely been constrained by unelected institutions.
The military’s political influence is not an invention.
That makes the present crisis more complicated, because civilian political competition occurs inside a system where the distribution of power has historically extended beyond parliament.
Khan himself came to power amid allegations from opponents that elements of Pakistan’s establishment favoured him. He and his supporters rejected those accusations.
Now, as his parliamentary position deteriorates, relations between Khan and the military establishment appear considerably less comfortable.
This creates an important lesson about informal political power.
Politicians can benefit from institutions being unusually powerful while those institutions appear to favour them and then discover the danger when the relationship changes.
Strong democratic rules therefore protect incumbents and opponents simultaneously.
A politician should want independent institutions not because those institutions will always help them, but because nobody can guarantee who will control informal power tomorrow.
This is similar to what happened with Alpha Condé in Guinea last year. Weakening constitutional norms can appear useful while you hold power. The problem becomes visible when you need those same norms to protect you.
Pakistan’s military complicates the analogy because it has not seized power in the present crisis. The immediate struggle remains parliamentary.
That is precisely why the no-confidence procedure should be allowed to operate.
If Khan retains enough votes, he should remain prime minister.
If he does not, he should leave office.
There should be nothing revolutionary about either outcome.
The political difficulty comes from the narrative surrounding the vote.
Khan has increasingly framed the opposition challenge not simply as domestic parliamentary competition but as a struggle between an independent Pakistan and forces supposedly willing to subordinate the country to foreign interests.
That framing is powerful because it changes the moral status of political opposition.
If my opponent merely disagrees with me, compromise is possible.
If my opponent is corrupt, I may still have to accept their legal right to compete.
If my opponent is an agent of foreign powers attempting to overthrow the national government, compromise begins to look like treason.
Political language changes the bargaining space.
The more existentially politicians describe their opponents, the harder peaceful transfer becomes.
This is why evidence for foreign interference matters so much. If another government genuinely attempted to engineer the removal of Pakistan’s prime minister, that would be a serious violation of sovereignty and deserves investigation.
But extraordinary allegations require evidence proportionate to their consequences.
A diplomatic communication expressing displeasure with a government’s policy is not automatically proof of a regime-change operation.
States pressure one another constantly.
Diplomats complain.
Governments threaten consequences.
Officials express preferences about foreign leaders.
Interference begins when those actions cross into attempting improperly to manipulate another country’s political process.
Those categories should not be collapsed simply because doing so is politically useful.
There is also an economic backdrop to Khan’s vulnerability. Pakistan has faced high inflation, rising food and energy costs, fiscal pressures and persistent external financing problems. The global commodity shock created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is making those pressures worse.
Khan’s government argues that many of these problems are international rather than uniquely Pakistani. That is partly correct. Oil prices are not determined in Islamabad. The pandemic disrupted economies globally. Russia’s invasion has increased commodity volatility across the world.
But governments are judged partly on problems they did not create.
That may feel unfair, yet it is unavoidable.
Voters do not consume “international causes”. They consume food and fuel.
A government therefore needs enough economic resilience to manage external shocks, not merely an accurate explanation of where those shocks originated.
This is where political accountability becomes complicated. A government can lose support because of bad outcomes it did not fully cause. An opposition can then exploit those outcomes even if it would have struggled with exactly the same constraints.
Democracy does not guarantee that voters perfectly identify causation.
It gives them the authority to judge anyway.
That can produce bad electoral decisions.
The alternative is deciding that some institution other than voters or parliament should determine when citizens’ political judgements are sufficiently informed to count.
That alternative is much more dangerous.
Khan’s political appeal has always depended partly on presenting himself as an outsider confronting Pakistan’s entrenched political elite. His cricket career gave him national recognition long before politics, while PTI built support around anti-corruption, welfare and the promise of a “Naya Pakistan”—a new Pakistan.
That outsider identity creates both strength and vulnerability.
It allows Khan to portray established political parties as parts of one corrupt system.
But once an outsider becomes prime minister, eventually they become responsible for the system too.
Four years in government changes the credibility of blaming everything on predecessors.
This is a problem populist leaders encounter repeatedly. Populism works by dividing politics between a virtuous people and a corrupt elite. Once the populist governs, institutional constraints can then be portrayed as mechanisms through which the old elite prevents the people’s will from being implemented.
Courts become obstructionist.
Opposition parties become corrupt conspirators.
Journalists become biased.
Coalition partners become traitors.
The leader gradually becomes the only institution capable of authentically representing “the people”.
That is where populism can become dangerous for democracy.
No politician represents the people in their entirety.
Khan has millions of genuine supporters.
His opponents represent millions of Pakistanis too.
Democracy exists partly because no individual receives the right to convert popular support into permanent political ownership.
This is why a no-confidence motion can be democratically legitimate even if opinion polls showed Khan remained personally popular.
Pakistanis elect a parliament.
The parliamentary majority determines the government.
If citizens dislike how their representatives behave, they can judge those representatives at the next election.
There is a reasonable criticism here. Legislators switching sides between elections can appear to betray voters who elected them under a particular party banner. Coalition bargaining can look opportunistic. Money and patronage can influence political loyalty.
Those are genuine problems.
But the answer is improving rules governing party finance, parliamentary defections and political transparency, not declaring the legislature irrelevant whenever its arithmetic becomes inconvenient.
Institutions need reform.
They still need to operate while being reformed.
Pakistan’s crisis also demonstrates the difference between formal and informal legitimacy. Khan may lose the parliamentary numbers while retaining enormous popular support. A successor government could therefore be constitutionally legitimate while politically fragile.
Those categories can coexist.
Legality tells us who is entitled to exercise office.
Political legitimacy tells us whether enough citizens accept that authority for government to function effectively.
A new government formed after a successful no-confidence vote would therefore need more than parliamentary arithmetic. It would need to convince Pakistanis that the transition followed constitutional rules and that the next election remains a genuine opportunity for citizens to choose among competing political projects.
Khan, if removed, would have a responsibility too.
Opposition is part of democracy.
He would be entirely entitled to criticise the new government, organise rallies, campaign for elections and attempt to return to office.
What matters is whether he distinguishes opposing the government from delegitimising the constitutional mechanism that produced it.
That distinction may determine whether the current crisis strengthens or weakens Pakistani democracy.
There is a strange opportunity here.
Pakistan’s history contains repeated interruptions of civilian political rule. A prime minister losing office through a parliamentary vote rather than a military intervention could therefore represent institutional development even if the process is ugly.
Democratic consolidation does not necessarily look dignified.
Politicians defect.
Coalitions collapse.
Speeches become dramatic.
Opponents accuse each other of corruption.
Votes occur at inconvenient times.
The relevant achievement is not political harmony.
It is that everyone continues treating constitutional procedures as more legitimate than force.
This is something I have started appreciating much more after following political crises across the last year. Stable democracy is not a system in which nobody tries to remove the leader.
It is almost the opposite.
It is a system in which removing the leader becomes ordinary enough that nobody needs to destroy the state to accomplish it.
Britain can replace a prime minister without replacing the constitution.
Italy can spend eight ballots choosing a president without soldiers appearing outside parliament.
Germany can remove a governing coalition through elections and spend weeks negotiating another.
The individuals matter enormously.
The system matters more.
Pakistan has historically struggled to establish that hierarchy.
This week’s crisis is another test.
If Imran Khan commands the confidence of the National Assembly, he has every constitutional reason to remain prime minister.
If he does not, losing office does not prove that democracy has failed.
What happens next determines that.
A politician’s commitment to democracy is easiest to demonstrate after victory. Everyone likes institutions that certify their success.
The harder test arrives when those institutions begin producing an outcome they desperately want to prevent.
That is when the difference between believing in democracy and believing in one’s own mandate becomes visible.
Pakistan is approaching that moment.
Whatever happens to Imran Khan, the best possible outcome is surprisingly simple: parliament votes, the constitutional result is respected, and everyone lives to fight the next election.
For a country whose political history has so often made transfers of power extraordinary, making one boring would be an achievement.
