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When he was a cricketer, and the Pakistani national team was fighting, the fans were singing: "Who can save Pakistan, it's Imran Khan, it's Imran Khan!"
"And singing has now continued in its gatherings," says Omar Wariach, a Pakistani political badyst and former newspaper correspondent.
For his followers, Khan came full circle, from the man who led Pakistan to victory at the 1992 Cricket World Cup, to win Pakistan.
On Friday, the Pakistani Electoral Commission declared that the Khan's party, the Pakistani Justice Movement, won the largest share of seats in the National Assembly, paving the way for Khan to become the next Prime Minister Minister of the country.
He has a rare trajectory. A sports legend who was also a handsome playboy and a British celebrity – he married one of Britain's richest socialites – and transformed his public image. He became a philanthropist and took the mantle of public piety even as he turned to politics.
He now badumes leadership of one of the most populous Muslim countries in the world, facing enormous challenges at home and abroad. Pakistan is a nation with nuclear weapons that has hostile relations with its neighbors, Afghanistan and India. He is in debt, faces rising temperatures and dwindling water supplies. Meanwhile, activists continue to wreak havoc on the periphery of the country.
The World of Pakistani Politics
For some badysts, Khan corresponds to a mold similar to other conservative populists who have enjoyed new favors in recent years. In the case of Khan, this populism is oriented towards Islamism. He promised to make Pakistan an Islamic welfare state. "Imran himself says that one of the people he would like to emulate is Recep Tayyip Erdogan," says Wariach, referring to the Turkish president, who has increasingly tightened his grip on power. "Even among his supporters, some worry that he can take this comparison a little too far."
Even before official results were announced, Khan reached out to the Pakistanis, promising to lead the country "as never before". He has sworn to fight corruption and reduce poverty. On foreign policy, he called for peace with India; praised China, Pakistan's closest ally; and criticized the United States, arguing that Pakistan has been waging war on behalf of Washington.
"America is helping Pakistan fight the US war," he said in a speech aired from his home in the wealthy suburb of Islamabad on Thursday. "This is causing a lot of damage in Pakistan," he said. "We want mutually beneficial relations with the United States."
However, it is still unclear what control Khan will have over the policy towards the United States, India and Afghanistan, which have long been the responsibility of the army.
Khan's party was found with 116 of the 272 disputed seats in parliament. Despite the magnitude of his victory, his victory was marred by allegations that the military and justice conspired to curb the electoral success of his main rival – and to push him to the position of Premier. Minister. Nawaz Sharif, a former Pakistani prime minister and leader of the former ruling party, alleges that many cases of corruption have been committed against him and his family in order to destroy their political future.
These cases stem from the publication of the Panama Papers in 2016, which detailed how Sharif's children were linked to offshore companies that owned high-end apartments in London.
As a result of these revelations, Khan noisily urged the courts to investigate the Sharifs, who offered contradictory explanations of how the apartments were paid. The courts will eventually oust Sharif as prime minister in 2017. Sharif was also banned from public office and then, weeks before the elections, sentenced to imprisonment for a matter surrounding the property of the apartments.
In the run-up to elections, other leaders of Sharif's party have been the subject of criminal charges under anti-terrorism laws. A chief was sentenced to life imprisonment in a narcotics case. There was also a crackdown on the media perceived as supporters of Sharif. This prompted a monitoring team from the European Union to declare Friday that the run-up to the elections in Pakistan had "reshaped the political environment before the elections".
The State Department stated "to share concerns about flaws in the pre-election electoral process," which included "restrictions on freedom of expression and badociation during the election campaign that were in contradiction with the stated purpose of the Pakistani authorities: fair and transparent election. "
The army, which ruled Pakistan for nearly half of its history, denied any interference, just as it has made the judiciary.
Khan, too, rejected these allegations, saying that corruption is what drove down his rival. Answering a question from the NPR at a press conference earlier this month, he said, "How would a Western government react?" Would not they put someone behind bars like that? "he said." How can there be sympathy for someone like that? "
For his detractors, this meant that Khan was lodged in the army, the institution Pakistan's most powerful – as long as he could win.
Not a stranger to the public eye
Khan is from a wealthy family who resides in the second plus Pakistan's largest city, Lahore.He studied at Oxford University and spent his years traveling around Pakistan and the UK, where he became a sought-after celebrity for his cricket talents. , his easy charm and his beauty.He even married a wealthy British socialite, Jemima Goldsmith, who converted to Islam and moved to Pakistan with him – they divorced on good terms in 2004 after nine years of marriage.
At the time when he retired from cricket as a hero in the early 1990s, he started raising money for a hospital and a cancer research center, named after his mother. According to Mosharraf Zaidi, Islamabad columnist for Pakistan The News International and co-editor of a political affairs podcast entitled How to Pakistan, this effort inspired a generation of Pakistanis to rally behind to a philanthropic cause.
"I'm part of a generation of Pakistanis who went door-to-door all over the country to raise money for Shaukat Khanum Hospital," Zaidi says.
Khan created "self-awareness and civic sense of duty and responsibility," he says. It was the "first time that a politician had done something like this in Pakistan."
Khan entered politics around the same time, founding his Pakistan Justice Movement Party in 1996. He protested against Pakistan's military dictatorship at the time. "He protested against the repression of the press," says Wariach. "He protested against enforced disappearances." He was also vehement against Pakistan's involvement in the war on terror, and pleaded for negotiations with the Taliban.
Slowly, he built a sequel while he was tackling Pakistan's endemic corruption, and convened "a robust and diverse coalition of people who could win elections," Zaidi says.
But for years, his party had won only one seat – his own. Then, in 2013, the party won about 10% of the national badembly, according to Zaidi. They became the main opposition party, attracting socially conservative urban middle clbad voters.
"We want change and we want it to bring change," says Iftikhar Ahmed, 23, a salesman at a sports goods shop in Islamabad. "We have already tested the others," says Ahmed. "Imran will improve education, it will stop money laundering, it will put an end to corruption, it will bring so many reforms."
No longer a stranger to criticism,
But for Khan's critics, he is a man who aspires to power, not to governance. They cite a detrimental sit-in that paralyzed the Islamabad capital in the fall of 2014 after Khan claimed that his rivals had rigged the elections in their favor. Meanwhile, as a lawmaker, he was one of the most absent legislators in the Pakistani parliament – representing only 4% of every day lawmakers are expected to attend, according to Pakistan's Free and Fair Election Network. .
They see him as a disrespectful leader who calls his opponents "donkeys" – leading some to blame his followers for torturing at least one real-life donkey in a hate frenzy, according to local media reports.
They criticize its populist promises, which they say are unrealistic and unachievable. These promises include the swift end of corruption, the promise of building 5 million affordable housing, the creation of 10 million jobs and the revitalization of tourism.
Among some Pakistani feminists, Khan is viewed with suspicion for saying that Western feminism has degraded motherhood. He was also accused of badual harbadment by a former lawmaker of his party, Ayesha Gulalai, whom Khan did not comment on last year.
Her second marriage, with Pakistani journalist Reham Khan, lasted less than a year and ended in divorce in 2015. She later wrote a salacious book about Khan and claimed to be suffering from domestic violence, which Imran Khan would have denied. .
Now 65 years old, Khan's party confirmed his third marriage to Bushra Manika earlier this year. He married her secretly. She is called one of her spiritual counselors and she covers her face in public.
Some see Khan with suspicion for what they say, that is his penchant for activists.
They point out that his government coalition is providing millions of dollars in funding for a seminary led by a man who is considered the spiritual father of the Taliban. He also openly supports Pakistan's blasphemy laws, which have been used disproportionately to punish minorities. A radical cleric who founded a militant organization close to al-Qaeda also announced that he was joining Khan's party.
Zaidi says that the presumption that Khan has embraced extremists is incorrect.
Khan and his party "are very cynical and opportunistic politicians, and so their adherence to the right wingers has often been based on cynical calculations," he says. "What I find more dangerous," he says, "is the degree of moral agnosticism that he demonstrates in his dealings."
Wariach offers a different interpretation. Imran Khan is as contradictory as Pakistan itself, he says. "Imran is not alone in being someone who may seem liberal at one time but who also has conservative opinions – to be comfortable in the West and to be comfortable in a village here, that's true for many Pakistanis, "says Wariach. Khan.
Abdul Sattar of the NPR contributed to this report
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