ISLAMABAD - Slain former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto’s party Saturday named ex-parliamentary speaker Yousuf Raza Gilani as its candidate to be the troubled country’s new prime minister.
Bhutto loyalist Gilani was chosen more than a month after the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) emerged as the biggest party from general elections and agreed to form a coalition government with ex-premier Nawaz Sharif.
The 58-year-old Gilani is now a virtual shoo-in to be elected as prime minister when Pakistan’s new parliament meets on Monday, ahead of a looming showdown with key US ally President Pervez Musharraf.
‘I have great pleasure in calling upon Yousuf Raza Gilani in the name of Shaheed (martyr) Benazir Bhutto to accept the heavy responsibility to lead the coalition government and the nation,’ said a statement by Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari that was read out to reporters by a party spokesman.
The statement said that Gilani was the ‘consensus’ candidate of the coalition.
Musharraf, whose political backers lost heavily in the elections after five years in power of the nuclear-armed nation, is set to swear in the new premier on Tuesday.
Gilani is a stalwart figure in the PPP and friend of Zardari who spent five years in jail under Musharraf’s regime on corruption charges that were later overturned.
He was speaker during her second term in power from 1993 to 1996 and a minister during her first term from 1988 to 1990.
Party spokesman Farhatullah Babar would not comment on reports that Gilani would be a stop-gap premier until Zardari, who is not an MP, becomes eligible to stand for the post by contesting a by-election in May.
The party struggled to settle on a candidate amid a power vacuum left by the charismatic Bhutto’s assassination in December, with Gilani emerging only in the last week.
The other contenders were ex-trade minister Ahmed Mukhtar, party president Makhdoom Amin Fahim and Punjab province party chief Shah Mahmood Qureshi.
Sharif said in Lahore that his Pakistan Muslim League-N party ‘will raise no objection on the PPP nominee,’ adding: ‘Musharraf should understand that the days of dictatorship are numbered.’
A nominee of Musharraf’s allies meanwhile quit the race for the premiership, but the main party that supports the US-backed president said it would field another candidate so the PPP’s nominee would not be uncontested.
The president’s political ally, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), said it had decided to withdraw its candidate as a ‘gesture of goodwill.’
‘We have decided to extend unconditional support to the PPP nominee,’ Farooq Sattar, the candidate of the Karachi-based MQM, told AFP by telephone.
The decision to withdraw was taken after Zardari held talks with MQM leader Altaf Hussain, who lives in exile in London, Sattar said.
Sattar, who met leaders of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q), which backs Musharraf, later confirmed that he was quitting the race at a news conference.
PPP spokesman Babar hailed the MQM support as ‘a positive development.’
But PML-Q chief Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain said his party would nominate Sattar’s replacement on Sunday.
‘We have decided to contest the election for prime minister and not to withdraw from the political process,’ Hussain told reporters here.
Western governments are keenly observing the political scene in Pakistan, with a showdown looming between the new parliament and Musharraf, a frontline ally in the US-led ‘war on terror.’
The coalition government appears set for a confrontation with Musharraf-who seized power in a military coup in 1999 -- after vowing to reinstate judges whom the president sacked during a state of emergency in November.
If restored, the judges could overturn Musharraf’s re-election as president in a parliamentary vote in October and effectively rule his grip on power illegal.
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