In Pakistan, political power and influence are often concentrated in the hands of specific families over multiple generations. Successive governments over the years have featured members of a few select families hold positions of power or influence.
Pakistan’s political landscape has long been dominated by well-established families, including the Sharif clan of three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif, a wealthy industrialist family from Punjab, and the Bhutto dynasty of feudal aristocrats that has ruled the southern Sindh province for decades, given the country two prime ministers and whose scion, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, has now set his sights on the PM’s office.
The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), a major political party which has been elected to power three consecutive times in Sindh since 2008, has nominated 191 candidates for the upcoming national and provincial assembly elections in the province. A large number of the candidates are from 12 prominent political families in Sindh.
Former Pakistani president and PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari has been nominated as the party’s candidate from Sindh’s NA-207 constituency in Shaheed Benazirabad. His son and PPP chairman, Bhutto-Zardari, is contesting the polls from the NA-194 seat in Larkana and NA-196 in Kambar-Shahdadkot.
Zardari’s sister Dr. Azra Fazal Pehchuho has been nominated to contest from the PPP’s platform for the provincial assembly constituency of PS-36 in Shaheed Benazirabad. Another sister of the former president, Faryal Talpur, is contesting polls from the PS-10 constituency in Larkana.
Meanwhile Syed Khursheed Shah, a former leader of the opposition in Pakistan’s National Assembly, is contesting from NA-201 in Sukkur, with his son Syed Farrukh Shah, running for the provincial constituency PS-24.
Shah’s son-in-law, Syed Owais Shah, is contesting polls from PS-23 in Sindh’s Sukkur district.
