Nawaz Sharif: Biography, Education, Family and the Journey of Pakistan’s Three-Time Prime Minister (2026)

Who is Nawaz Sharif?

Here is the plain outline. No one has been Prime Minister of Pakistan more often than Nawaz Sharif, and no one has been thrown out of the job in more ways.

A president sacked him. A general overthrew him. A court disqualified him. He has been sentenced to life imprisonment, exiled to Saudi Arabia, jailed in his own country and declared an absconder. Each time, commentators wrote his political obituary. Each time he came back.

He began as the protégé of a military ruler. He ended as the politician most at odds with the military’s role in politics, and then, in his seventies, made his peace with it once more. That long arc, from the establishment’s man to its adversary and back, is the story of Pakistani politics over forty years.

Nawaz Sharif has won three national elections and never completed a term. His career is the best single illustration of where power in Pakistan has really lain.

The Sharif family

His family were Kashmiris who had settled near Amritsar, in what is now Indian Punjab. At Partition in 1947 they moved to Lahore.

His father, Mian Muhammad Sharif, was a self-made industrialist. With his brothers he built a small foundry into the Ittefaq group, one of the largest steel businesses in the country. He was the unquestioned head of the family, and it was he who decided that his sons should enter politics.

The family’s estate at Raiwind, outside Lahore, is named Jati Umra after their ancestral village.

Education

• He went to Saint Anthony High School in Lahore.
• He studied at Government College, Lahore.
• He took a law degree from the University of the Punjab.

He was not a scholar by temperament. As a young man he loved cricket and wrestling. He joined the family business after his studies.

How a businessman became a politician

In 1972 Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto nationalised heavy industry. The Sharifs lost their foundry overnight. The family never forgave the PPP, and the experience drew them towards Bhutto’s opponents.

When General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in 1977, the business was returned. The family looked for a way to protect itself in future. The answer was politics.

Punjab, 1981 to 1990

In these years he was the favoured son of the military establishment and the leader of a right-wing alliance built to keep the PPP out. He was also popular in his own right, especially among Punjab’s traders and industrialists, who saw in him one of their own.

First term: 1990 to 1993

When Benazir Bhutto’s government was dismissed in August 1990, his alliance won the election. He became Prime Minister at forty.

What he did

• He opened the economy: state companies were sold, controls on foreign currency were lifted and private business was encouraged.
• He began the Lahore to Islamabad motorway, the first in the country.
• He launched popular schemes such as cheap loans for taxis.

How it ended

He quarrelled with the President over who should appoint the army chief and over the President’s power to dismiss governments.

He lost the election that followed and spent three years as Leader of the Opposition.

Second term: 1997 to 1999

Benazir Bhutto’s second government was dismissed in 1996. In February 1997 he won the largest majority in Pakistan’s history, more than two-thirds of the National Assembly. His supporters called it the “heavy mandate”.

He used it to gather power.

• A constitutional amendment took away the President’s power to dismiss governments.
• Another barred members of Parliament from voting against their party.
• He clashed with the Chief Justice; a mob of his party’s supporters stormed the Supreme Court building in November 1997.
• The President resigned. An army chief who suggested a formal role for the military in government was made to resign too.

By 1998 no office in the country could check him. His critics called it elected dictatorship.

The nuclear tests

On 11 and 13 May 1998 India tested nuclear weapons. The world’s leaders telephoned him, offering money and threatening sanctions, to persuade him not to reply.

On 28 May 1998 Pakistan carried out its own tests in the hills of Balochistan.

The decision made him a hero at home. It also brought sanctions, a freeze on foreign-currency bank accounts and an economic crisis. He has always regarded the tests as the defining act of his life.

Peace, then Kargil

In February 1999 India’s Prime Minister travelled to Lahore by bus. The two leaders signed a declaration promising to settle their disputes peacefully. It was the warmest moment between the two countries in a generation.

Within months, Pakistani forces were found to have occupied heights on the Indian side of the line in Kargil, in Kashmir. Fighting followed. Under heavy international pressure he flew to Washington in July 1999 and agreed to a withdrawal.

Who knew what about Kargil has been argued over ever since. He has said the army acted without telling him. The army chief of the time, General Pervez Musharraf, said he was fully briefed.

The coup

The two men no longer trusted each other.

On 12 October 1999 he dismissed General Musharraf while the general was on a flight home from Sri Lanka, and named a replacement. The army refused to accept it. Within hours troops had taken over the television station, the airport and the Prime Minister’s house.

He was arrested. It was Pakistan’s fourth military takeover.

Prison and exile, 1999 to 2007

He was put on trial for trying to prevent the general’s aircraft from landing. In April 2000 a court sentenced him to life imprisonment for hijacking and terrorism.

In December 2000, after the intervention of the Saudi royal family, he and his family were sent into exile in Saudi Arabia. The government said he had agreed to stay out of politics for ten years. He denied there was any such deal, then later acknowledged an understanding of five years.

While abroad he did one thing that mattered. In May 2006 he and his old rival Benazir Bhutto signed the Charter of Democracy in London, promising that their parties would never again join hands with the military against each other.

He tried to return in September 2007 and was put back on a plane within hours. He returned for good in November 2007, weeks before Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

In 2009 the Supreme Court set aside his hijacking conviction.

Third term: 2013 to 2017

His party came second in the 2008 election and won the next. In June 2013 he became Prime Minister for the third time. It was the first transfer of power from one elected government to another in Pakistan’s history.

What he did

The pressure

• In 2014 Imran Khan and a cleric led a sit-in outside Parliament for four months, alleging that the 2013 election had been rigged.
• His wish to put General Musharraf on trial for treason, and his outreach to India, strained his relations with the army.

The Panama Papers and disqualification

In April 2016 a leak of documents from a law firm in Panama showed that his children owned offshore companies, which in turn owned flats in an expensive part of London.

He said the money was his family’s lawful business income. His opponents demanded to know where it had come from. The matter went to the Supreme Court.

He responded with a question that became a slogan, asking the country why he had been removed. He toured Punjab arguing that the vote had been dishonoured.

Convictions

His wife, Kulsoom Nawaz, died in London in September 2018 while he was in prison.

London, 2019 to 2023

In October 2019 he fell gravely ill in custody. Courts granted bail on medical grounds, and in November 2019 the government allowed him to travel to London for treatment for four weeks.

He stayed for almost four years. Pakistani courts declared him an absconder. From London he directed his party and, in 2020, made speeches naming serving generals as responsible for his removal, something no mainstream politician had done before.

The return

In April 2022 Imran Khan’s government was voted out and his brother, Shehbaz Sharif, became Prime Minister. The ground was prepared for his return.

By the start of 2024 no conviction stood against him and he was free to contest.

2024 and after

In the election of 8 February 2024 he stood in two seats.

• He lost in Mansehra, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
• He was declared the winner in NA-130 Lahore. His opponent, a PTI leader who was then in jail, disputes the result and says the polling-station counts showed her ahead. The Election Commission stands by the result.

His party won fewer seats than it had hoped and needed allies to govern. He had been expected to become Prime Minister for a fourth time. He stepped aside. His brother took the post again, and his daughter became Chief Minister of Punjab.

In May 2024 he was elected president of the PML-N once more, the post he had been forced to give up in 2018.

Since then he has kept a low public profile. He chairs party meetings, appears at his daughter’s projects in Punjab and, since 2025, has been patron of an authority set up to restore Lahore’s historic buildings.

His health

He has a long history of heart trouble, including surgery. In September 2025 he travelled to London for a medical check-up and told reporters there that his health was fine. A later report, apparently from April 2026, said his stay in London had been extended on doctors’ advice.

Three terms compared

What supporters and critics say

Supporters see the builder of modern Punjab: motorways, power stations, the nuclear tests. They see a leader who was removed three times by unelected forces and who showed, by coming back each time, that the vote matters. They regard the 2023 acquittals as vindication.

Critics see a politician raised by a dictator who complained of the military’s power only when it turned against him. They say the source of his family’s wealth abroad was never properly explained. They recall the attack on the Supreme Court in 1997 and his attempt to concentrate power. And they say that in 2024 he returned to office-holding for his family through an election whose fairness is widely questioned.

Each view has merit. He is both a victim of Pakistan’s unelected power and, at other times, its beneficiary. That is what makes him so representative of his country’s politics.

Words used in this article

Timeline: Nawaz Sharif at a glance

Why his story matters

• It is the story of civilian rule in Pakistan. Three mandates, three removals.
• It shows how courts shape politics. He was restored by the Supreme Court in 1993 and removed by it in 2017.
• It is not over. With his brother and daughter in the two most powerful elected offices, his family’s place at the centre of Pakistani politics is as strong as it has ever been.

To understand the offices he has held, read our explainers on the National Assembly, the vote of no confidence and the caretaker government.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• National Assembly of Pakistan, member profile: Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif — read on 8 October 2026.
• Wikipedia, “Nawaz Sharif” — opening summary and early-life section, as last edited on 7 October 2026; some of its claims were not adopted.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Nawaz Sharif” — standard reference for checking dates; address written from memory.
• Daily Times, “Nawaz Sharif departs for London for medical checkup” — September 2025.
• Pakistan Muslim League (N), official website