Daily Times

Centre right political parties are doing rather well. The PML-N, the archetypal centre right conservative political party won the mandate in Pakistan’s elections two years ago. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) essentially decimated the centre left Indian Congress last year. In the US, the Republican Party won both houses of Congress and the hard right Likud, led by Bibi Netenyahu, won surprisingly in Israel. The Conservatives, against all polls, won outright in the UK. Time for the left and even the centre left political parties to call it a day?
From a personal perspective, I can only make some observations about two countries, the US and Pakistan. First, about the US: over the last two decades, the two major political parties moved pretty close to each other except on some social issues. The old liberal left in the US has been absorbed by the neo-liberals of whom Bill Clinton as president was the best example. Gone are the days of the Ted Kennedy type liberals who unabashedly stood for the ‘little guy’. Today, big money has corrupted the political system so much that all serious candidates for the US presidency, be they from the right or the left, have to listen to rich people who give money to candidates running for office. In the US, only a couple of billionaires are in the position to determine whom the next Republican candidate for the presidency just might be. Things are not quite that bad on the Democratic side but they are not all that good either.
For five years in Pakistan two major centre left political parties, the PPP and the ANP, ran the central government and the government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, while the PPP ran Sindh at times in coalition with the secular, centrist MQM. However, in the 2013 general elections, the PPP was wiped out in Punjab while the ANP lost out in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. From being a leftist, populist party, the PPP has now become just a party of Bhutto loyalists in Sindh and the ANP is similarly limited to Wali Khan supporters in Khyber Paktunkhwa. It is clear that both these parties have lost their leftist identities and have become identified with corruption and incompetence.
The US has gone through hard economic times over the last few years but things are much better now. President Obama has helped steer the country out of the great recession and has also given US citizens the first major overhaul of healthcare, providing health insurance to millions of US citizens who were previously without medical coverage. Yet Obama and his political party have suffered pretty badly in the recent elections with the Republican Party winning control of both houses of Congress as well as a majority of state houses and state legislatures. The question then is: why are so many ordinary people voting against what would seem to be their best interests or at least against the political party that seems to be on their side? Perhaps the next US election will clear things up a bit when Obama is no longer the head of the Democratic Party.
Frankly, there is no populist, centre-left party left in Pakistan, which has major support among the people any more. The PPP used to hold that position but it no longer represents the aspirations of poor Pakistanis. The majority party in Pakistan, the PML-N, is a centre right political party that has always represented the agriculturists and business communities. In the last general election it won a majority of seats in Punjab, wiping out virtually all its opposition. The question then is whether the majority of the voters in Punjab are no longer poor and disadvantaged, and now support a centre-right political party like the PML-N? This is highly unlikely but a case can be made that the poor people in Punjab did vote against their own interests, or so it would seem.
The interesting ‘change’ that seems to be creeping up on us in Pakistan is that the party in position to compete against the PML-N is a party that represents a similar support base and agenda. That is of course Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI). Based on what seems to be going on at present, the next general election in Pakistan will most likely be a contest between the PML-N and the PTI. In essence what we might see is two centre right parties fighting it out. The supposedly populist pro-people parties of the past will probably continue to remain relatively ‘local’ and/or regional in their appeal. Here again the question might arise that in a country where a majority of the population is classified as poor, why do people support political parties that do not represent their interests?
Those of us on the left of the political spectrum might suggest that if only parties like the PPP and the ANP go back to their populist (socialist?) roots then they could win back the support of those who supported them in the past. Even though what happened in the UK is not very similar it is definitely worth looking at for those who hope for a return to the left. The Labour Party did exactly that and lost out almost completely in Scotland and, to a great degree, in the UK. So, even in the UK where ‘ordinary’ people have suffered much under Conservative rule there was little sympathy for Labour.
Perhaps what we are seeing is the emergence of a population in Pakistan that is well connected through cell phones and social media. It is possible that a person with a mobile phone in Pakistan does not think of himself or herself as poor anymore. Those too poor to own a mobile phone do not count since they probably are neither registered to vote nor do they bother to vote.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians
of North America (APPNA)