Imran Khan will be PTI candidate on all 33 vacant NA seats, says Fawad
After the NA speaker accepted the resignations of 35 PTI legislators, the announcement was made.
Imran Khan, the chairman of the PTI and a former prime minister, has decided to run in all 33 National Assembly by-elections that have become vacant after the speaker accepted the resignations of the party’s 35 legislators on Tuesday.
The resignations of 35 Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) members, including two MNAs elected from reserved seats, were accepted earlier today by National Assembly Speaker Raja Pervez Ashraf. These MPs left their posts in April of last year after the ousting of former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
PTI leader Fawad Chaudhry issued a brief statement on Twitter stating that “Tehreek-e-Insaf would contest elections on all of the seats and Imran Khan will be the candidate of Tehreek-e-Insaf on these thirty-three seats.”
Imran Khan gained six seats in the National Assembly for the PTI in a by-election in October of last year. This election was considered as a direct confrontation between the former ruling party and the current ruling alliance, which also won two seats.
Imran ran for seven of the eight National Assembly seats that the PTI had previously held, while Meher Bano Qureshi was tasked with protecting the party’s stronghold in Multan. Hakeem Baloch triumphed in Karachi, while Ali Musa Gilani triumphed in Multan, signalling progress for the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).
On April 11 of last year, two days after party chairman Imran Khan was removed as prime minister by a no-confidence vote, 123 PTI MNAs abruptly quit.
On April 17, however, the newly
The newly elected NA Speaker Raja Pervez Ashraf instructed the assembly secretariat to handle the PTI legislators’ resignations again and deliver them to him so that they could be handled legally.
The ruling coalition had developed a plan for the mass resignations of PTI legislators from the assembly in June of last year and had decided to move through with phase-wise acceptance. As a result, the NA speaker proceeded to accept 11 of the 123 resignations.
