The 2024 election showed narrative now beats electables

Why this episode replaced an economy episode

Muzamil had planned to talk about Pakistan’s economy. He assumed that by the weekend after the 8 February 2024 vote, a new government would be clear and he could work from there. It was not clear. He recorded this episode on Sunday night, with data up to that point, and said so at the start. His aim was twofold: a plain recap for people who went to vote and now had no idea what was going on, and a projection of who would form the government and what would follow.

He framed it as a record. “I am putting this on the internet for the archive,” he said, “so that 12 to 18 months from now we can look back at it.” He also called it his last video on politics for a while. His involvement, in his words, ended at casting his vote. He followed the aftermath for a few days to form a view, and this is that view.

Election day, as he saw it

By and large, Muzamil says, polling across Pakistan was peaceful. International observers said the same. There were isolated incidents, and he notes that little reliable information came out of Balochistan. The problems he lists are about management. In parts of Karachi, polling stations opened hours late because ballot papers and boxes had not arrived. Long queues formed. In past elections, he says, voting was often extended when lines were long. This time it closed at 5 pm sharp, and people still waiting outside did not vote.

Mobile phone service was also shut down on election day. In his reading, this hit PTI voters hardest. An average constituency has 250 to 300 polling stations. Voters who had planned to look up their station and their candidate’s symbol on their phones could not.

He also describes the conditions PTI ran under. The party had lost its symbol in a court case, so its candidates stood as independents with scattered symbols. Its senior leadership was in jail or in hiding. Rallies were blocked. Mainstream surveys, he says, predicted about 30 seats for PTI, 110 to 120 for PML-N and 70 to 80 for the PPP. He credits PTI with fighting on a digital front instead: online rallies, AI chatbots on its pages to help voters find their symbol, and young volunteers going door to door. “We have not seen that level of citizen engagement in the political process,” he says.

How results are built, and where he says they broke

Muzamil gives a short explainer on counting, because the whole dispute turns on it. At each polling station, votes are counted in front of the parties’ polling agents. The tally goes on a Form 45, which the agents and the presiding officer sign. The returning officer (RO) then consolidates every Form 45 in the constituency, in front of the candidates or their agents, into a Form 47. If a candidate sees a discrepancy at that stage, they can ask for a recount.

On election night, he says, early results showed PTI-backed independents leading in about 135 of roughly 200 declared seats. Then party tallies disappeared from TV tickers. At 10:30 pm, a new rule routed presiding officers’ results through ROs instead of directly online, and he says no new results came out until about 7 am. When they did, independents had fallen to about 60 to 70 seats, while PML-N had risen to 60 to 65 and the PPP toward 45 to 50.

Muzamil does not take the polling-station claims at face value. “At the polling station level, we can say we don’t know whether they are right or wrong,” he says. His focus is the RO level, which he says is easier to check. There, in his account, candidates were kept outside during consolidation, and the Form 47s did not match the signed Form 45s PTI had collected. He points to a FAFEN report that, as he describes it, found the process broadly fine at polling stations but found discrepancies at the RO level. He also notes that this time ROs came from the bureaucracy instead of the judiciary. PTI challenged that in court and lost, and he gives the courts a large share of the blame for what followed.

He gives PTI credit for one thing above all. Days before the vote, the party kept telling supporters to leave every polling station with a signed Form 45. Those forms, he says, are now the basis of its whole case.

What he expected from the coalition math

As Muzamil laid it out, PTI said it had 101 seats officially and claimed it had been denied about 70 more. It faced three fights. The first was legal: tribunals and courts, which he expected to be slow. The second was reserved seats, which depend on PTI being treated as a party and not as a group of independents. The third was holding its own winners together, since independents can be pulled to other parties. “This opened the door to horse trading,” he says.

His projection was a coalition of PML-N, PPP and MQM. He called it a second PDM, a rerun of the previous 16 months. In his view, the parties in front would be figureheads with little real power. PTI had said it would not ally with the PPP, and he saw no way for it to govern alone.

That raised his core economic worry. “When economic reforms have to come, you need a strong government that has the mandate of the people,” he says. Reforms bring hard times, and people only accept those from a government they voted for. He expected privatisation, possibly of PIA and the power distribution companies, and a likely return to the IMF. He did not expect major reform.

What the establishment can and cannot do

The strongest argument in the episode is about power. Muzamil says he agrees with PML-N and PPP that the establishment helped PTI in 2011, 2013 and 2018, mainly by bringing electables into the party. Their mistake, in his view, was to conclude that PTI was only a product of the establishment and could be dismantled the same way.

“The establishment can certainly amplify,” he says. “But they can’t make or break anyone.” He points to new parties that did not take off despite support, and to MQM’s weak showing, as evidence.

He sees the public as the stakeholder everyone ignored. “This public is not a flock of goats that will follow whichever truck light you put them behind,” he says. In his reading, Imran Khan represents a public sentiment that people formed themselves through the internet and the media. He shapes that sentiment. In Muzamil’s view, he did not create it.

Two old assumptions he says the vote buried

Muzamil argues that the result ended two long-held beliefs about Pakistani politics. The first is that only electables win. He says several established politicians lost to newcomers and grassroots workers. “The electables were completely destroyed in this election and ideology won,” he says. The second is that voters have no views of their own and sell their vote for a little cash or a plate of biryani. He says voters chose candidates they had never heard of because they agreed with the idea behind them.

He also highlights women. PTI-backed women contested and, by his account, won in conservative areas such as Peshawar and Dera Ghazi Khan. For him, this is one of several benchmarks that point to “a very hopeful and optimistic future for Pakistan,” whatever party you support.

He adds social media to the list. Despite shutdowns and blocked websites, he says, people can no longer be managed through television alone. He sees this as a serious problem for TV channels that stay inside a managed system.

Why he thought PTI was better off in opposition

Muzamil calls his next view unpopular with PTI voters. Even if PTI could form a government, he argues, legal battles, cases and fights over seats would eat its first two or three years. In opposition, with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, about 90 members in the National Assembly and the opposition leader’s seat, he thought it would be a strong counterweight instead. He speculated that Imran Khan would prefer to wait for a two-thirds majority.

He listed dates to watch: Senate elections in March, the Chief Justice’s retirement in October 2024 and the US election in November. He also expected about five million new voters within a year, whom he thought would lean toward PTI.

His bottom line

Muzamil closes with his own forecast, offered as an opinion to be checked later. “My thesis used to be that authoritarianism would rise further. That is no longer my thesis,” he says. “I think 8 February was its peak.” He expected power centres to shift slowly and the news to improve month by month. The economy was the one area he expected to suffer.

His advice to viewers was to step back from the daily noise. Once he has a sense of the big picture, he says, he lets the data play out and focuses on what he can control. He planned to revisit his analysis in about six months, not every week.