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Aziz faces no-trust vote

Nirupama Subramanian

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Opposition parties will table a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in the National Assembly on August 23.

The chairman of the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy Makhdoom Amin Fahim announced this after a meeting of Opposition parties on Wednesday.

The main players are the 12-party ARD, of which Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim league (N) are chief constituents, and the six-party Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a coalition of religious groups in which the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islami are the most important. Though the MMA is diametrically opposed to the professed secular policies of the ARD, the two groups joined hands last month for the purpose of the no-confidence vote.

With the MMA announcing its support for the no-confidence motion, the ARD said it would participate in protest meetings of the MMA. Still, the combined Opposition does not yet have enough numbers in the National Assembly to carry the motion. But the coming together of the Opposition puts pressure on the Government to keep its flock together. One of the first to take advantage of the situation was the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, an ally of the PML(Q) that resigned from its posts in the Federal Cabinet as well the provincial government in Sindh on the same day as the MMA and ARD came together.

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