Pakistan: PPP leader Asif Zardari rules out ‘seat adjustment’ with any party

Former President and the co-chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party, Asif Ali Zardari, ruled out the possibility of seat adjustment with any political party in the 2024 general elections, ARY News reported on Tuesday. His remarks came during a meeting with the party’s Punjab province leadership in Lahore, which was focused on the PPP’s strategy for the upcoming elections. He announced that his party would contest the general polls “on their own”, adding that the PPP was receiving multiple requests for party tickets from every constituency, vowing to award tickets to the “strongest candidate”.
Earlier, it was reported that PPP leadership decided not to make seat adjustments with PML-N in the upcoming general election and termed it a ‘loss trade’.
ARY News reported, citing PPP sources, that the seat adjustment with PML-N is a ‘loss trade’ as the failure of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) tenure will fall on PML-N in the upcoming general elections. All political parties are gearing up for the upcoming general elections, scheduled to be held in February 2024, interviewing candidates and strategising their policies. Recently, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) issued the final constituency list including the number of National Assembly (NA) and Provincial Assembly (PA) seats. The ECP spokesperson said in a statement that two special tribunals wrapped up 1,324 objections to the delimitations. There will be 266 NA and 593 PA seats across Pakistan, ARY News reported. In the National Assembly, Balochistan has a total of 20 seats, including 16 general and four reserved seats for women; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has 45 general seats and 10 reserved seats for women; Sindh has a total of 75 NA seats and of these, 61 are general and remaining 14 are reserved for women; while in Punjab there are 141 general seats and 32 seats reserved for women.