Throngs Greet Bhutto on Last Day of Campaign to Lead Pakistan

“Benazir is coming,” roared a crowd of 10,000 men jammed into the serpentine alleys of Lahore’s old market. “Bhutto is still alive.”

Trucks filled with young men waving the green-black-and-red flags of the Pakistan People’s Party inched through the provincial capital of Lahore behind party leader Benazir Bhutto, who lost her voice shouting to her admirers on the marathon motorcade.

Campaigning ended Monday for Pakistan’s critical national elections, which will be held Wednesday. Bhutto, widely regarded as the front-runner to become the next prime minister and reprise her role as the only woman to lead this Muslim nation, finished the campaign with a traditional last-day rally in Lahore, the capital of the influential Punjab region.

Bhutto’s main rival, Nawaz Sharif, who was prime minister until he resigned under pressure from the army in July, staged his last campaign rally in Rawalpindi on Monday night.

“It’s a battle between a dynasty and democracy,” Sharif said in an interview with The Times. He was referring to Bhutto’s role as political heir to her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the country’s first freely elected prime minister, who was hanged by the military in 1979. “The country needs to restore a democratic system of government.”

For her part, Bhutto has made corruption in Sharif’s government the main issue of the campaign, although her government was also accused of being crooked when she was prime minister from 1988 to 1990.

“It’s the difference between a pickpocket and a highway robber,” a Pakistani journalist and political consultant said, distinguishing between Bhutto and Sharif.

The current election promises to be one of the most unusual of the past decade, principally because the army, long the most potent political force in Pakistan, has chosen to remain on the sidelines in the campaign. The army has always been hostile to the Bhutto family and actively opposed Benazir Bhutto in 1990.

“It’s without question the freest election in Pakistan since 1970,” said I.A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

Another new factor is the collapse of the old alliance system, in which several parties joined together to compete for seats in the 217-member National Assembly.

In the last government, Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League, considered right wing in Pakistan’s political spectrum, was allied with Islamic religious parties. But the religious right has now turned against Sharif and has mounted a strong campaign.

The result is that in areas where Sharif had traditionally counted on doing well, his party has to compete with religious parties as well as with Bhutto. Under the country’s first-past-the-post system, that could cost Sharif dearly in terms of overall number of seats.

In Pakistan’s population of nearly 120 million, only about 20% of the people are literate and the voting becomes an test of personal popularity rather than issues.

In fact, Bhutto and Sharif are fairly close on most major issues, with Bhutto having backed away from many of the socialist policies of her party to favor privatization of state-owned companies, many of which were nationalized by her father. At the same time, Sharif has tried to broaden his appeal with a controversial program of loans to the lower middle class for use in buying cabs.

After the national elections Wednesday, provincial elections will be held Saturday. There are concerns that if Bhutto wins in the national vote, Sharif’s party could retain control of the Punjab assembly, which might create government gridlock and bring down the government in just a few months.