Pakistan Elections 2024: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Vote, the Results and What Followed

Why this election mattered

Most elections decide who governs. This one was also a test of whether the voters would be allowed to decide.

The most popular politician in the country was in prison and barred from standing. His party had been stripped of its symbol. The army, which has shaped every Pakistani election, was widely believed to want a particular outcome. And still, on the day, tens of millions of people queued to vote, and the result surprised almost everyone.

The election gave three different answers at once: the opposition won the most seats, its rivals formed the government, and neither side accepted that the other had played fair.

The road to polling day

The symbol

In Pakistan, where many voters cannot read, each party is identified on the ballot paper by a picture. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, had used a cricket bat for decades.

In December 2023 the Election Commission ruled that the party had not held proper internal elections and could not use the symbol. The Supreme Court agreed in January. The effect was that every PTI candidate had to stand as an independent, each with a different symbol: an aubergine, a kettle, a bed, a pair of shoes. The party had to teach its voters a different picture in every constituency, largely through social media.

Polling day and the long night

Voting itself was largely peaceful. Two things, however, damaged trust.

Mobile phone services were switched off across the country for the whole of polling day. The caretaker government said this was to prevent terrorist attacks. Critics said it stopped voters finding their polling stations, stopped party agents reporting results and stopped the public following the count.

The results were late. Early returns on television on the evening of 8 February showed PTI-backed candidates leading in a large number of seats. Then the flow of results slowed and, for many hours overnight, stopped. When it resumed, a number of those leads had gone.

The Election Commission said the delay was caused by the communications shutdown and by a failure in its results system. PTI said the gap was when the numbers were changed.

The results

National Assembly, general seats

No group came close to the 134 general seats that would have pointed to a majority of the full house.

The provinces

What the map showed

• PTI’s vote held. Despite everything, its candidates took roughly three votes in ten nationwide, more than any party, and swept Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
• Punjab split. The province that decides Pakistani elections divided between PML-N in the centre and PTI-backed candidates in the north and in many cities.
• Sindh stayed with the PPP, outside Karachi.
• Karachi swung to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a result PTI and a religious party both challenged.
• Famous names lost. Several senior figures of the old order were beaten by little-known independents.

The dispute over the count

Form 45 and Form 47

Two pieces of paper are at the centre of the argument.

PTI’s case is that in dozens of constituencies the Forms 45 collected by its agents add up to a win for its candidate, while the official Form 47 shows a win for someone else. It claimed that, properly counted, it had won about 180 seats.

The Election Commission’s answer is that the documents PTI relies on are unverified, that genuine complaints belong before election tribunals, and that isolated irregularities do not amount to a stolen election.

The official who spoke out

Nine days after the vote, the senior civil servant in charge of the Rawalpindi division told a press conference that results in his area had been altered under his supervision, and offered to be punished. He was removed from his post. Days later he withdrew the statement and said he had made it at the urging of a PTI figure. Each side cites the half of that story which suits it.

What observers said

• The Commonwealth observer mission reported that the conditions before the election had limited fair competition and that the shutdown and the delay had reduced transparency.
• The independent Pakistani network FAFEN praised the conduct of polling at most stations but criticised the secrecy of the tabulation stage.
• The United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union each expressed concern and called for the complaints to be investigated.
• The International Monetary Fund, unusually, urged a fair and peaceful settlement of the disputes.
• The caretaker government and the Election Commission rejected the criticism and said the vote had been free.

The tribunals

Hundreds of petitions were filed. The law says each should be decided within 180 days. Most were not. Many were still pending a year or more later, and observers’ tallies showed that the great majority of those decided were dismissed.

Why the world moved on

The foreign statements of February 2024 were sharper than usual. They were not followed by action. Within weeks governments that had asked for investigations were congratulating the new prime minister, and the International Monetary Fund was negotiating a new loan with his finance minister.

The reason is not hard to find. Pakistan was close to default, has nuclear weapons and borders Afghanistan, Iran, China and India. Outside powers wanted a government in Islamabad they could deal with more than they wanted an audit of how it was chosen. For the opposition this was proof that the world’s concern for democracy stops where its interests begin. For the government it was proof that the complaints had been overdone.

Forming a government

With no majority, the arithmetic took over.

1. Mr Khan refused to deal with either of the two older parties, which he regards as corrupt, and said his members would sit in opposition.
2. On 13 February PML-N and the PPP announced that they would work together. The PPP would support a PML-N prime minister but take no ministries, and would receive the presidency and other constitutional posts.
3. Nawaz Sharif stepped aside. He had been expected to take the office for a fourth time. With a weak mandate, he nominated his younger brother.
4. On 3 March 2024 the National Assembly elected Shehbaz Sharif prime minister by 201 votes to 92 for PTI’s candidate, Omar Ayub Khan.
5. On 9 March Asif Ali Zardari was elected president.

PTI’s members, to gain the standing of a party in the house, joined a small registered party, the Sunni Ittehad Council.

The reserved seats

The last act took eighteen months.

The result of that final ruling was that the governing coalition held two-thirds of the National Assembly, enough to amend the Constitution. It did so in November 2025.

How the campaign was fought

The three main parties fought three very different campaigns.

PML-N campaigned as the government-in-waiting. Its message was experience: Nawaz Sharif had built the motorways and ended the power cuts, and would fix the economy again. He returned from London in October 2023 to a large rally in Lahore, and his remaining convictions were overturned within weeks. The party’s rallies were well organised and widely televised. Its manifesto appeared only days before the vote. Many observers, and many in the party, assumed the result was settled.

The PPP campaigned hardest. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari toured the country for weeks, presented a ten-point programme of free electricity units, higher wages and housing, and attacked both his rivals as yesterday’s men. His aim was less to win outright than to hold Sindh and make himself indispensable to whoever did.

PTI could barely campaign at all. After the attacks of 9 May 2023 thousands of its workers had been arrested and scores of its leaders had left the party, many at press conferences that followed a set pattern. Its rallies were refused permission or dispersed. Candidates complained that their nomination papers were snatched or rejected. Television channels avoided naming its leader.

So the party moved online. It held “virtual rallies” watched by millions, during which access to social media platforms slowed across the country. It used an artificial-intelligence copy of Mr Khan’s voice to deliver speeches written from his prison notes. It built a website and messaging tools that told each voter which symbol, among hundreds, belonged to its candidate in their constituency. For a generation that gets its news from a phone, the television blackout hardly mattered.

Why the result surprised people

Almost every forecast had pointed to a comfortable win for PML-N. Several things were underestimated.

• Sympathy. Three convictions of Mr Khan in the week before polling, one of them concerning his marriage, struck many voters as too much. Instead of discouraging his supporters, they seem to have provoked them.
• Young voters. Tens of millions had come of age since 2018. They turned out, and they voted heavily one way.
• Inflation. The sixteen months in which PML-N and its allies had governed, from April 2022, saw the worst price rises in the country’s history. Voters remembered who had been in charge.
• Anger at interference. A share of the vote was cast less for one party than against the belief that the result was being arranged.
• Local candidates. Many PTI-backed independents were lawyers and first-time politicians with clean names, facing well-known figures who had changed sides.

None of this proves what the result would have been in a different climate. It does explain why those who expected the old patterns to hold were caught out.

Turnout, women and young voters

• About 61 million people voted, a turnout of about 48 per cent, lower than in 2018.
• More than four in ten registered voters were under 35. Their support for PTI, organised largely on phones, was the story of the election.
• About ten million fewer women than men were on the voters’ list.
• Only about a dozen women won a general seat in the National Assembly. The other women members hold reserved seats.

What the election changed

Two and a half years on, the consequences are clearer.

Supporters of the government say the result gave Pakistan the stability it needed to avoid default. Its opponents say that the country was given stability in place of a choice.

Words used in this article

What comes next

The assemblies elected in 2024 run until early 2029 unless dissolved sooner. Before then:

• by-elections continue to be held as seats fall vacant;
• local elections in Punjab remain overdue;
• the new Federal Constitutional Court will hear the remaining election appeals.

Read more in our explainers on the caretaker government, the vote of no confidence and the Senate.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Wikipedia, “2024 Pakistani general election” — introduction and reactions section read; last edited 6 October 2026.
• Election Commission of Pakistan — for official results and notifications.
• Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) — for its observation reports on the 2024 election.
• National Assembly of Pakistan — for the list of members.
• Aaj English, “Election Results 2024: Counting underway” — 8 February 2024.
• The Commonwealth — for the observer group’s report on the 2024 election.