ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader and newly-elected President Dr Arif Alvi resigned from his National Assembly seat on Wednesday.
Alvi was elected from NA-247 in Karachi during general elections 2018. Later, he was nominated by the PTI for presidency against Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) candidate Aitzaz Ahsan and joint-opposition candidate Fazlur Rehman.
He is expected to take oath on September 9.
Alvi elected as Pakistan’s 13th president
A three-way race paved the way for an easy victory for Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) Arif Alvi in the presidential election on Tuesday.
In the National Assembly and Senate, 430 votes were polled, of which six were rejected. President-elect Alvi received 212 votes, while his opponents – Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz led opposition’s Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP) Aitzaz Ahsan – got 131 and 81 votes, respectively.
While the combined opposition vote in the Parliament equalled the votes polled by Alvi, the latter led the opposition candidates, even with their votes combined, in the final count of provincial legislatures.
Based on the Election Commission of Pakistan’s formula for calculation of the electoral college for the presidential election, Alvi got 141 votes from legislatures in all four provinces – 33 of the 58.34 votes polled in the Punjab Assembly, 22 of the 60.74 in the Sindh Assembly, 41 of the 57.13 in the Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Assembly and 45 of the 60 polled in the Balochistan Assembly.
PML-N led opposition alliance secured 55 votes – 25 in Punjab, 1 in Sindh, 14 in KP, and 15 in Balochistan. PPP’s Ahsan got 42 votes, 39 of which came from Sindh, just one from Punjab and two from KP. Even with their votes combined, the opposition candidates trailed Alvi with 44 votes.