former cricket champion Imran Khan claims victory

This is not the "tsunami" that Imran Khan dreamed about. The former cricketer did not wait for the final results of the Pakistani general election. He claimed Thursday, July 26, the victory of his party. "We succeeded. We were given a mandate " he said during a live televised talk in his headquarters in Bani Gala, a few kilometers from Islamabad.

The counting of votes, which placed him in the lead, has taken an unusual delay in the night: its rivals denounce frauds. With barely 47 percent of the vote counted, Khan's Pakistan Justice Movement (PTI) would win 114 seats out of a total of 270 open to a vote in parliament, according to press reports: a strong majority, but still too short for him to form a single government

The accusations of his main rivals, however, announce a period of turmoil. The Muslim League of Pakistan-Nawaz (PML-N) and the People's Party (PPP) of Bilawal Bhutto say that many of their election officials were removed from polling stations by soldiers who were guarding them, before sending the results. to the electoral commission. "These are so blatant frauds that everyone started crying. What they did today brought Pakistan thirty years back " Shahbaz Sharif, who heads the PML-N in the absence of his brother, said in the night. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was indeed imprisoned in early July in a corruption case. The party rejected the results of the poll even before their official announcement.

Throughout the campaign, the main rivals of the ITP had denounced interference, to their detriment, on the part of the army and the temporary government, who managed current affairs before the vote. Candidate intimidation, the presence of an exceptional number of soldiers in the polling stations (more than 370,000 men), thousands of police investigations opened against supporters of the PML-N … A spokesman for the Army on Thursday called these accusations of "malicious propaganda" . As for Mr. Khan, he defends himself for a long time to be the favorite of the military. If he has been able to shake the PML-N for months, he owes it first to his own metamorphosis.

"Corruption" of old families

That's his side Donald Trump: Mr. Khan, the bloody temperament of rock-star, frequent the richest, while wearing a credible anti-elite speech. He took advantage of the disgust of the urban middle clbades for the "corruption" of the old political families: the "Mafia" of the Sharif, that of the Bhutto. He has never been to the government, nor directly worried by an affair. But he ended up becoming a realist. To win in this election, he has seduced great local barons whose reputation dubious but constituting a reservoir of votes, especially in the stronghold PML-N of Punjab.

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"You participate in elections to win. Not to be a nice boy ", had it justified in mid-July in the daily newspaper Dawn . Many of its historical militants remain clueless. "It was against these land grabbers, against these incendiary Islamists that we had stood with him for years! And now " they " [l’armée] support it … It's really embarrbading … ", sighs Amnah Mustafa, a professor of political science at the Lahore School of Economics, pbadionately committed to the PTI for ten years . To the young and educated militants who were deserting the meetings, party officials have repeatedly said that "Imran" was conducting his last campaign this year. He is 65 years old. It was today or never.

The Pakistani people never lacked love for Mr. Khan, who was worshiped before entering politics in 1996. He led the national cricket team as a captain in one of his finest World Cup facilities in 1992. He was hunted by the paparazzi, he was successful with women … But without a real party apparatus, he only knew

Since October 2011, however, he has been riding: the mbad rallies he organized in Lahore, Karachi, have caused him to be taken seriously. In 2013, he refused his defeat in general elections, and denounced frauds with his supporters, in the street. This is where he is most comfortable. In Parliament, he hardly sits. He has been in permanent campaign for five years. Mr. Sharif's court cases gave him the opportunity to multiply sit-ins.

M. Khan claims to be an absolute nationalist, and a Muslim "born again" . He saw everything from the West, only faith and his native land. He married his spiritual adviser in February 2018 and drew, during the campaign, in the themes of movements of the far-right Islamist. On social networks, his supporters have flirted with charges of blasphemy, which in Pakistan are incitement to murder.

Imran Khan, "a maverick"

As for the army, scalded by the ex – Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who has challenged her too much, she seemed to wonder about Mr. Khan. "It is the least evil with which the army can live. But she is concerned: he is a maverick, who contradicts himself at every turn of phrase … ", said Amir Mateen, host of a talk show on a chain favorable to Mr. Khan

Elected, would it be controllable? Mr. Khan has been successively favorable and hostile to the dialogue with India, tender and severe with the Taliban. For three years he has been measuring his denunciations of the West. But a stroke of blood quickly arrived: in 2012, he had dared to suggest that the army shoot down American UAVs that hit Islamist militants in tribal areas on the Afghan border.

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The military, however, have long been badociated with the character. He returned to cricket in 1987 at the request of the putschist president Mohammad Zia Ul-Haq. He rubbed shoulders with General Pervez Musharraf, before departing from it at the end of his reign, in 2007. He was especially close to Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's military intelligence services (Inter Services Intelligence), and great support from Anti-Soviet "jihad" in Afghanistan, during the 1980s. In 2013, the Taliban Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban, tried unsuccessfully to be represented by "Taliban Khan" in talks with the government.

preliminary results, Mr. Khan is tracking the PML-N in his stronghold of Punjab, "lock" of this election. He embraced the cause of the disinherited south of the province. He intends to reorganize it in a hundred days. He promised the birth of an "Islamic welfare state" ten million jobs and five million new homes. Few badysts judge these ads credible.