PPP, PML-N, ANP agree to form Govt
Staff Report

ISLAMABAD—The party of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto will form a coalition government with ex-premier Nawaz Sharif after their crucial election victory, the parties announced Thursday. The announcement came after their parties trounced allies of President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections on Monday and poses the former general with a severe challenge to his weakening grip on power.
“We have agreed on a common agenda. We will work together to form the government in the centre and in the provinces,” Sharif told a news conference after talks with Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari. Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is set to be the biggest party in the new parliament, followed by Sharif’s. “The sooner he (Musharraf) accepts the verdict, the better it is for him,” Sharif told reporters.
The move brings them closer to the two-thirds majority they would need to seek Musharraf’s impeachment, leaving him in the most precarious position since he seized power in a 1999 coup. Sharif said the two parties had overcome their differences over his demands for the immediate restoration of the country’s chief justice, whom Musharraf sacked in November. “In principle there is no disagreement on the restoration of the judiciary. We will work out the modalities in the parliament,” said Sharif. The move comes despite what party officials said were efforts by Musharraf to try to divide Zardari and Sharif and persuade Zardari to form a coalition with his own parties. Bhutto — who was assassinated in a suicide attack in December that the government has blamed on Al-Qaeda — had been in talks with Musharraf on a possible power-sharing deal in the months before her death.
Zardari said the coalition would not involve any parties from the alliance that backed former general Musharraf during the last parliament from 2002 until November 2007, adding: “We are not looking at pro-Musharraf (parties).” Sharif earlier addressed hundreds of protesters and lawyers outside deposed chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry’s Islamabad home, where the judge remains under house arrest. “It is your duty to adhere to the law and not to abide by the orders of Pervez Musharraf who is illegal and unconstitutional,” he told the demonstrators as hundreds of paramilitary troops and police stood guard. His comments came after anti-Musharraf lawyers clashed with police. Police fired tear gas at lawyers calling for the restoration of Chaudhry, the deposed chief justice, in the southern city of Karachi. Thousands more demonstrated elsewhere. Chaudhry, who was sacked by Musharraf under emergency rule in November, said in a telephone address to the lawyers in Karachi that there was no constitutional hurdle to judges getting their jobs back.
“I was deposed by an executive order and I can be restored by an executive order. There is no need of two-thirds majority of the parliament,” said Chaudhry. If Chaudhry gets his job back he could overturn Musharraf’s controversial victory in a presidential election in October and oust him as president. In the eastern city of Lahore about 2,000 lawyers chanted “Go, Musharraf, go” and “Restore independence of judiciary” during a protest.
Musharraf has rejected calls to quit in the wake of his allies’ electoral defeat. He has been backed for most of his time in office by the United States as a key ally against Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. The embattled leader, who stepped down as army chief late last year, extended an offer of cooperation to his rivals on Wednesday, calling for a “harmonious coalition” after the polls. Zardari’s first meeting on Thursday was with the leader of a small ethnic Pashtun secular grouping, the Awami National Party (ANP), which defeated hardline Islamic parties in the country’s insurgency-hit northwest.