The Prime Minister and the Cabinet ministers have returned from the UK, and have met party supremo Mian Nawaz Sharif, but have not achieved the clarity on certain issues that they had gone to seek. Basically, there are two issues, and they are interlinked, being the petrol subsidy and the timing of fresh elections. It is apparent that the split within the PML(N) is so great that Mian Nawaz was not able to paper over the cracks, let alone resolve the differences and thus end them.
One dangerous difference that has come into the open is that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif believes the petrol subsidy should continue, because the poor cannot bear the burden of inflation that would follow. That inflation is going to be made worse because of the depreciating rupee, while Finance Minister Miftah Ismail made it clear in his remarks after returning that he favoured at least a partial removal of the subsidy. He probably fears the time when the government is unable to meet the subsidy. The subsidy is not sacrosanct, being only introduced by the PTI government as a populist measure in its dying days. The Shehbaz government would not have introduced it, and would probably have absorbed the blow of its withdrawal by now. With no end to the Russo-Ukrainian war, and rising world oil prices, in sight, the increasing burden can only have one end in sight: the government running out of money, a default on salaries and a plunging rupee, and paralysis because of a failure to import fuel.
Does the government wish to hold elections only when this has happened? Though there is a section within the PML(N) that wants the government to last its full constitutional term, it might well end up taking more baggage into an election at present than it would like to. At present, there is only the inability to handle the crisis the PTI left behind. At the end of a year and a half, the government would take a record of economic underperformance, indeed mismanagement, that would form a seamless whole with the PTI, with the difference that the present government could be carrying the can, The visit has shown, if nothing else, the problems of having a government-in-waiting as well as a government-in-office, not to mention the party trying out that peculiar balancing act also having to carry along a wide array of coalition partners. With the party also faced with an internal split, perhaps expecting any decision at all would be shooting for the moon.
