Here’s the post-election bumper sticker in Pakistan: Musharraf Balloted Out. Tariq Azeem, former federal information minister, when asked on a TV channel to comment on whether the elections were a referendum against General (retd) Pervez Musharraf, said they were not because the president is not elected directly.

Rely as Azeem did on a technicality, he is wrong. These elections are a verdict against Musharraf because the outgoing PMLQ was never a viable political entity.

Indeed, five years from now, the Q-League is unlikely to be in the electoral contest as a party.

While it will be sometime before psephologists can systematically work out the trends in this election, some broad strands are visible.

First, the voter wanted to punish Musharraf and that meant voting for the opposition parties. To that extent, we have seen the two major parties, the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, picking up their traditional vote and more.

Second, and this flows from the first, both parties have done well in their respective strongholds of Sindh (PPP) and Punjab (PMLN). The PPP has also done well for the provincial seats in the NWFP and in Punjab. Its showing in the Punjab could be better if the party had campaigned more aggressively in the province after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

Third, the PMLN has done much better than even the Sharif brothers could have expected. This is owed to Nawaz Sharif’s consistent stand on the issues of the deposed judges, amendments to the constitution and even Musharraf’s re-election. Additionally, with the Jama’at-e-

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