At 19, tragedy may have given him a headstart but Bilawal Bhutto Zardari isn’t the only famous son leading the surge of Generation Next in Pakistani politics.

If the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is banking on the Bhutto name, the PML (N) is set to initiate former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s nephew Hamza Shahbaz, while the ruling PML (Q) is introducing its Punjab president Parvez Elahi’s son Moonis in the elections.

Bilawal will reach the minimum age to contest in six years, but both 33-year-old Hamza and Mansoor, 31, are standing for elections for the first time.

Bilawal was a three-month-old infant when Bhutto first became the Prime Minister in 1988, and has now become the party’s youngest chairman. But his mother had apparently begun his political “grooming”.

Bilawal did his initial schooling from Islamabad’s elite Froebel’s school, but then went to Dubai to finish his schooling when his mother went into self-exile. Now he is studying at Oxford, which was the alma mater of both mother Benazir and grandfather Zulfiqar. Many here see uncanny parallels in this, pointing out that Benazir was in Harvard when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was sent to the gallows.

Political observers say Bilawal’s future depends on his relationship with father Asif Ali Zardari and the PPP’s prime ministerial candidate, Makhdoom Amin Fahim. “One can just hope that he doesn’t become a reflection of his father,” a senior journalist from Dawn remarked.

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