Parties Boycotting Elections Often Becomes Completely Detached From The Organs Of Power, Setting Itself Up For Further Setbacks
By Nadeem F. Paracha
January 10,
2021
On January
1, the multiparty opposition alliance, the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM)
announced that it would be taking part in the upcoming by-elections and did not
rule out taking part in the Senate elections.
Illustration
by Abro
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After
completing the first phase of its protest movement with a flurry of large
rallies against the Imran Khan government, the PDM is now entering the second
phase of its initiative to oust Khan. PDM has been claiming that Khan’s
government was installed through a rigged election in 2018 by the military
establishment. The alliance sees Khan as a willing marionette of the
establishment that, it claims, is pulling his strings.
The PDM’s
decision to contest the upcoming by-elections and then possibly the Senate
elections is being looked at with suspicion by some analysts. Some of them are
not very fond of Khan’s regime (and vice versa). Yet, they haven’t held back in
explaining the possible move by PDM as an attempt to strike a deal with the
establishment to oust Khan without having to restore to more extreme measures.
They see a clash emerging within the PDM between the Zardari doctrine and the
Nawaz doctrine.
It was the
PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif who initially set into motion the PDM’s startling
anti-establishment agenda, which has clearly unnerved the regime and its
non-civilian backers. Asif Zardari, the chief of the PDM’s second largest
party, the PPP, has advised a more gradualist approach. It was on this advice
that the PDM agreed to contest the by-elections. But certain observers believe
that the PPP, which is heading the provincial government in Sindh, is hoping to
come to some sort of an understanding with the establishment. The PDM’s more
radical sympathisers were expecting a clear boycott of the by-polls and the
Senate elections.
It has been
a long-established understanding within the PPP that election boycotts do not
work. In her 1988 biography Daughter of the East, former chairperson of the
PPP, the late Benazir Bhutto, wrote that one of the biggest mistakes of her
political career was the boycott of the 1985 elections held during the
Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship. At the time, her party was heading an alliance of
anti-Zia parties, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD).
According to Benazir, MRD’s boycott allowed easy access to pro-Zia elements to
the corridors of power. Ironically, one of these elements was Nawaz Sharif.
In 2007,
when an anti-Musharraf multiparty alliance, the Alliance for Restoration of
Democracy (ARD), decided to boycott the 2008 general elections, Benazir
disagreed with the decision. She insisted that the boycott would facilitate Gen
Musharraf to continue ruling the country as a dictator, with the help of
parties that were already supporting him in the parliament.
For
Benazir, a boycott would have aided these parties to retain their hold on the
assemblies and continue to legitimise the Musharraf regime. Benazir was able to
convince Sharif’s PML-N to contest. Both the parties not only went on to win
the majority of seats in the elections, but were also able to gather enough
clout to force Musharraf to resign.
In a 2017
essay for the Journal of Theoretical Politics, G. Buttorff and Douglas Dion
write that the decision to take part in elections organised by an authoritarian
set-up often poses a dilemma for parties opposed to such a set-up. The question
is, will their participation in elections, which are likely to be engineered,
legitimise the polls, or will a complete boycott of the elections fortify the
possibility of the boycotting parties gaining political influence? Benazir
believed that MRD’s 1985 boycott relinquished its political influence to those
who were handpicked by Zia to strengthen his position.
According
to Dion and Buttorff, one of the main reasons that parties boycott elections is
to expose ‘the bogusness’ of a tampered electoral process. This is the reason
being put forward by those who want the PDM to boycott the by-elections and
Senate polls. They believe no elections in Pakistan can be trusted to deliver a
fair verdict if they continue to be ‘engineered’ by the establishment and held
by a ‘hybrid regime’ like the one headed by PM Khan. But Dion and Buttorff add
that the other reason parties sometimes boycott elections is that they fear
“devastating electoral losses.”
This reason
can be understood on two levels. Firstly, parties can tactically boycott
elections if they believe that their vote-bank has weakened. Instead of
confessing to this, they announce that they are not taking part in elections
because they fear it will not be fair. The Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) boycotted the
1997 elections because, as exhibited by the rout the party suffered in the 1993
elections, its vote-bank had shrunk considerably.
The party
felt that another rout could plunge the outfit into a serious existential
crisis. The JI also boycotted the 2008 elections. Imran Khan’s PTI too
boycotted the same elections because, at the time, it was a tiny outfit with no
electoral influence — even though, along with the JI, the PTI claimed that it
was boycotting the elections because they were being held by a dictatorship.
However, in 2002, both the JI and the PTI had taken part in elections held
during the same dictatorship.
Secondly,
even parties with strong vote-banks can withdraw from elections because they
believe that their defeat, engineered by fraudulent elections, can dent their
reputation. The PML-N harboured this fear in 2007. Benazir helped Nawaz
overcome this fear, despite the fact that the PPP could have easily won Punjab
had PML-N not participated in the 2008 polls. The goal was to continue having
at least some influence and presence, even in an engineered parliament headed
by a common foe.
To Dion and
Buttorff, an elections boycott aims to disrupt a set-up that opposition parties
do not trust. The boycotting parties believe that once the electoral process is
proven as bogus, those engineering it would be forced to back down. But this is
rarely the case.
A study by
Matthew Frankel of elections boycotts in various authoritarian set-ups from
1990 onwards, shows that boycotts were unable to trigger any serious
disruption, and many parties that had boycotted elections returned to contest
them despite the polls being held by the same regimes they claimed were
undemocratic.
According
to Frankel, many boycotts lead to neither reform nor regime change, and leave
opposition parties worse off than they would have been had they participated.
In a 2010 policy paper for the Brookings Institute, Frankel writes “the
boycotting party often becomes completely detached from the organs of power,
setting itself up for further setbacks.”
In her book
Faith in Moderation*, the political scientist Jillian* Schwedler writes that,
if the holding of elections offers a way for authoritarian regimes to maintain
power, it also opens up a host of new opportunities for the regime’s opponents.
Once in, the opposition has a better chance of utilising non-electoral options
to push out a regime, than it has after completely shutting itself out through
a boycott.
Original Headline: TO BOYCOTT OR NOT TO
BOYCOTT?
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan