Pakistan finally has an election date. The Election Commission announced this week that the country’s general election will take place on 8 February 2024, ending months of uncertainty over when voters will choose a new National Assembly after parliament was dissolved in August. Under ordinary circumstances, fixing an election date would reduce political uncertainty. Pakistan’s problem is that much of the political contest determining what that election will mean is occurring before anybody receives a ballot. Former prime minister Imran Khan remains in prison and faces numerous legal cases, his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party is under substantial pressure, while three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif returned to Pakistan last month after almost four years in London. The country therefore has an election date without yet possessing widespread confidence that the political field leading towards it is neutral.
This matters because electoral integrity has both upstream and downstream dimensions. Downstream integrity concerns the part people normally imagine when discussing election fraud: are ballots secret, are votes counted accurately, are polling stations accessible and are results reported honestly? Upstream integrity concerns everything determining which choices reach the ballot in the first place: whether parties can organise, whether candidates are legally eligible, whether journalists can report freely, whether opposition leaders can campaign and whether state institutions enforce rules consistently. A country can perform the downstream stage relatively competently while distorting the upstream stage enough to influence the eventual result substantially.
This is why an election should not be evaluated only by what happens on election day. Imagine a race in which every runner who reaches the starting line receives exactly the same conditions, but one runner spent the previous six months being prevented from training while another received privileged access to the track. Beginning equal treatment at the starting gun does not erase the inequality that shaped who arrived prepared. Political competition operates similarly. The ballot is the final aggregation mechanism, not the beginning of the competitive process.
Imran Khan’s position makes this problem particularly acute because he remains one of Pakistan’s most popular politicians. He was removed as prime minister through a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April 2022, which was constitutionally legitimate in itself. Since then, however, confrontation between Khan, the government and Pakistan’s military establishment has intensified dramatically. His supporters accuse the state of attempting to remove him politically through prosecutions that they regard as selective. His opponents argue that Khan cannot receive immunity from ordinary law simply because millions of citizens support him. Both principles matter: popularity should not place a politician above law, while legal institutions should not become mechanisms for deciding which popular politicians citizens are permitted to elect.
The difficulty is that legal guilt and selective prosecution are not mutually exclusive possibilities. A politician can commit an offence and still be prosecuted more aggressively than others who engaged in comparable conduct because powerful institutions want that politician weakened. Conversely, a politician can face several legitimate cases and describe all of them as political persecution because doing so mobilises supporters. The existence of political incentives surrounding a prosecution therefore cannot determine whether the underlying charge is true. Evidence and procedural consistency have to do that work.
Pakistan’s history makes citizens unusually sceptical because political leaders repeatedly appear to move between establishment favourite and establishment enemy. Nawaz Sharif is perhaps the clearest example. He became prime minister three times, was removed in a military coup led by Pervez Musharraf in 1999, returned to politics, became prime minister again in 2013 and was disqualified from office in 2017 before eventually leaving for London. His return to Pakistan last month, at a moment when Khan is imprisoned and politically weakened, inevitably encourages speculation that the political establishment’s preferences have shifted again.
That speculation should not automatically be treated as fact. What matters is the pattern it reflects. Pakistani civilian politics has repeatedly operated in an environment where the military possesses enough independent institutional power that politicians need to calculate not merely whether voters support them but whether relations with the security establishment remain manageable. Formal constitutional authority and practical political authority therefore do not always occupy the same institutions.
This creates a problem of dual accountability. An elected government should principally fear losing support among voters because voters determine whether it remains in office. If politicians also need to retain approval from an unelected military establishment capable of influencing their political survival, they become accountable simultaneously to two constituencies, only one of which participates through elections. Democratic accountability becomes diluted because citizens cannot know whether the government is responding to them or to institutions they cannot remove.
The military’s defenders can respond that Pakistan faces extraordinary security problems and that civilian politicians have repeatedly demonstrated corruption, instability and poor governance. Those criticisms are not invented. Pakistan has experienced terrorism, conflict with India, political violence, severe fiscal problems and repeated economic crises. Civilian governments have frequently governed badly. Yet poor civilian performance does not establish that military political intervention improves the underlying institutions. It can instead prevent civilian accountability from developing because governments never acquire complete responsibility for outcomes.
This creates a vicious circle. The military intervenes because civilian institutions are weak. Civilian institutions remain weak partly because the military retains independent political authority. Politicians then seek establishment support because they cannot rely entirely on electoral competition, making parties more dependent on the very institution whose influence they publicly criticise. Every actor can explain its behaviour as a response to somebody else’s weakness.
The result is what political scientists often describe as a hybrid regime, although the label matters less than the mechanism. Pakistan contains genuinely competitive political parties, an active electorate, courts, media and regular elections. It also contains an unelected institution possessing political influence far beyond what militaries exercise in consolidated civilian democracies. Neither describing Pakistan simply as democratic nor simply as military dictatorship captures that combination adequately.
The February election will therefore test contestability rather than merely voting. Can the governing coalition genuinely lose? Can PTI organise effectively? Can candidates associated with Khan contest under predictable rules? Can Nawaz Sharif’s party campaign without receiving advantages unavailable to competitors? Can courts resolve disputes without outcomes appearing predetermined by political preference? These questions determine whether uncertainty about the result remains real.
Uncertainty is one of democracy’s underrated characteristics. In an authoritarian election, the government may know the result before voting because the institutional purpose of the election is confirming authority. In a functioning competitive democracy, nobody should possess enough control to guarantee victory beforehand. The uncertainty is not dysfunction. It is evidence that citizens retain causal power.
Pakistan therefore needs an election whose result political elites genuinely cannot know in advance.
That does not mean every party begins with equal popularity or resources. Democratic competition never produces perfect equality. Incumbents possess advantages, wealthy parties raise more money and charismatic leaders attract more media attention. The relevant threshold is whether those inequalities emerge primarily from political competition or from state institutions selectively changing the competitive environment.
This is the distinction between political advantage and institutional advantage. Nawaz Sharif is entitled to benefit from political experience, party organisation and supporters who prefer him. He should not benefit from legal institutions being manipulated against opponents. Khan is entitled to benefit from his popularity and mobilisation capacity. He is not entitled to exemption from laws that would be applied consistently to anyone else.
Neutral institutions do not produce equal outcomes.
They produce equal rules.
Pakistan’s economic crisis makes institutional credibility even more important. Inflation has remained high, foreign-exchange shortages have constrained economic activity and the country narrowly avoided a more severe external-financing crisis through an IMF programme earlier this year. The next government will therefore inherit difficult choices involving taxation, energy prices, public expenditure and structural reform. Those decisions will impose costs on citizens already experiencing substantial economic pressure.
A government beginning with contested electoral legitimacy will find those reforms harder to implement because political trust lowers the cost of economic adjustment. Citizens are more willing to tolerate painful policies when they believe the government possesses a legitimate mandate and that burdens are distributed fairly. If they believe the government entered office because competitors were excluded or weakened institutionally, every price increase can become another reason for political mobilisation.
Electoral credibility therefore has an economic return.
Pakistan’s relationship with the IMF illustrates the mechanism. IMF programmes frequently require governments to implement policies such as reducing subsidies, increasing revenue or reforming state-owned enterprises. These measures may improve fiscal sustainability but create immediate distributional costs. Governments need enough domestic political capital to explain why those costs are necessary.
If the government appears externally imposed or domestically engineered, opponents can frame reform as something elites and foreign institutions are forcing onto ordinary citizens.
That can make technically coherent policy politically unsustainable.
The same applies to investment. Businesses care about more than which party wins. They care whether rules survive political transitions. If every change of government brings prosecutions of previous leaders, policy reversals and uncertainty over which institutions actually control decisions, investors demand higher returns before committing capital.
Political instability therefore becomes a risk premium.
Pakistan pays for institutional uncertainty through more expensive borrowing, weaker investment and capital leaving the country.
That means civilian supremacy is not simply a constitutional principle. It has economic consequences. A predictable political system in which governments change through elections gives businesses a clearer mechanism for forecasting policy. A system in which elections coexist with opaque establishment influence creates additional uncertainty because formal rules do not fully describe how decisions are made.
Transparency lowers transaction costs.
Pakistan’s politicians share responsibility for this situation. Civilian parties have repeatedly criticised military interference while benefiting from it when directed against their opponents. A party excluded today can become the establishment’s preferred governing partner tomorrow. This creates a prisoner’s dilemma among civilian politicians: everyone would benefit from a military-neutral political system, but each party can gain a temporary advantage by accepting establishment support when offered.
The equilibrium persists because unilateral restraint is costly. If one party refuses informal assistance while believing its opponent will accept it, institutional principle becomes electoral disadvantage. Breaking the cycle therefore requires several major parties to accept simultaneously that losing fairly is preferable to winning through institutions that can later be turned against them.
That is an extraordinarily difficult commitment because political memory in Pakistan contains so many examples of leaders being removed, prosecuted or exiled. Politicians expect today’s restraint may simply make tomorrow’s persecution easier.
Institutions need to make defeat survivable.
A politician who loses an election should normally expect to become opposition leader, not prisoner or exile. A politician who wins should expect eventual scrutiny and another election, not permanent political control. When losing power threatens personal security, politicians gain stronger incentives to manipulate institutions before losing.
This is why democratic consolidation depends partly on lowering the stakes of political defeat.
Pakistan currently does the opposite.
Khan’s imprisonment, Sharif’s return and the uncertainty surrounding candidate eligibility all reinforce the perception that political survival depends on more than electoral support. Every leader therefore has incentives to control institutions while they can.
The February election could begin changing that expectation if it becomes sufficiently competitive that all major political constituencies believe their votes matter. It could reinforce the opposite expectation if citizens conclude that the decisive political choices were made before polling stations opened.
This is why international election observers should examine much more than ballot counting. They should evaluate candidate access, media conditions, political detentions, electoral administration and whether legal rules are applied consistently across parties. An election can be technically efficient and politically distorted simultaneously.
Pakistan’s voters themselves will probably make the most important judgement. They possess information outsiders do not about how freely parties can organise in their communities and whether state institutions appear neutral. High turnout would demonstrate engagement but would not alone prove fairness. Low turnout could reflect apathy, fear or simply electoral preferences.
No single statistic can certify legitimacy.
Legitimacy emerges from the broader process.
The election date nevertheless matters because uncertainty over whether voting would occur at all had become another source of instability. Fixing 8 February 2024 creates a focal point around which parties, voters and institutions can organise. Political science often underestimates the importance of predictable calendars. Regular elections transform political conflict from an indefinite struggle into a repeated game with known opportunities for change.
If I know another election occurs on a fixed date, I have more reason to tolerate losing today because I can compete tomorrow.
If election dates themselves become negotiable, political actors have stronger incentives to fight over the timing as well as the result.
Predictability therefore reduces political stakes.
Pakistan needs more of it.
The deeper challenge is ensuring the election becomes an actual mechanism for resolving political competition rather than the final ceremony after competition has already been managed elsewhere.
Ballots cannot repair every institutional weakness. They can still provide a peaceful mechanism through which citizens redistribute political authority.
That mechanism works only when voters believe the choices on the ballot arrived there through reasonably neutral rules.
Pakistan now knows when its election will occur.
The harder question is what political system will arrive at the polling station with it.
If candidates are excluded selectively, parties cannot organise freely or state institutions quietly decide which outcome they prefer, accurate vote counting at the end cannot restore everything lost beforehand.
Democracy begins before election day.
Pakistan’s February vote will therefore be judged partly by what happens over the next three months.
The election before the election has already started.
