Waiting in wings, Zardari picks low-key Gillani as Prime Minister

The nominee, Yousaf Raza Gillani, a politician from Punjab Province who was Speaker of Parliament in the 1990s under Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, is expected to be sworn into office on Tuesday. With Gillani in place, the new Government must then decide whether it will quickly seek a direct confrontation with a weakened President Pervez Musharraf over the reinstatement of judges he fired last November.

The selection of Gillani, 55, was announced after a bruising internal party fight in which Zardari seemed determined to keep open the option of running for Parliament soon so he could rise to the prime minister post. Zardari chose Gillani over Makhdoom Amin Fahim, a much better-known party leader who ran the Pakistani Peoples Party during Bhutto’s exile abroad. He would probably have been much harder to dislodge as prime minister when Zardari was ready to take over.

Gillani, a journalism graduate from Punjab University in Lahore, has spent most of his life in politics, first in the Pakistan Muslim League-N, and then in the more populist Pakistan Peoples Party. He was minister with portfolios including railways, housing and environment. He served four and a half years in prison on charges of having put too many people on the payroll when he was Assembly speaker, though he was not convicted, said his brother, Ahmed Mujtaba Gillani. Some of his prison term, which ended in 2005, coincided with Zardari’s 11 years in prison on corruption charges.

Chaudhry, the symbol of Pakistan’s vibrant lawyers movement and one of the catalysts for the strong anti-Musharraf sentiment across the country, has been under house arrest in the capital since November 3 with his wife and three children. He has been allowed no visitors, and he has managed only intermittent telephone contact with the outside world.

Once Gillani and a yet to be announced...