Ex-Pak foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar calls Imran Khan 'poster boy of populism'

ISLAMABAD: Former Pakistan foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar has called Imran Khan a ''poster boy of populism'', asserting that the jailed ex-prime minister was able to get the country's people to rally around ''great injustices'', but didn't have any plan to ''give them a way out'' when in power.

The 46-year-old Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader made the comments while speaking to a digital media company on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the Dawn newspaper reported on Wednesday.

''Imran Khan is (the) poster boy of populism,'' Khar said, highlighting that the 71-year-old Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party founder Khan was "able to get everybody to rally around what all is wrong and the great injustices." "However, when he comes to power, he doesn't have any plan to give them a way out, to sort it out. […] Even when they're in government, they act like [the] opposition," Khar, who also served as the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from April 2022 till August last year, was quoted as saying in the report. Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician, who became the prime minister in August 2018, was ousted through a no-confidence vote in April 2022.

Referring to the political rivalry of Khan's PTI party with the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the PPP-- which agreed on a power-sharing deal to form a new coalition government-- Khar said that "reconciliation" was way better than "recrimination".

After intense negotiations following a fractured poll verdict in the February 8 polls, PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari late on Tuesday announced that PML-N president Shehbaz Sharif, 72, will assume the role of the prime minister once again. Similarly, PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari, 68, will be the joint candidate for the president's office. "I hope that this will be our time where we come together and realise that from recrimination, reconciliation is far far far far far better," Khar was quoted as saying in the report.

She said that by refusing to speak to "X and Y and Z" — referring to other parties in the National Assembly — the PTI was not respecting its own mandate.

Meanwhile, in a post on social media platform X, the PTI party hit out at the newly cemented PPP, PML-N alliance as 'PDM 2.0' ''PDM 2.0 = #MandateThieves.'' The February 8 general elections, which resulted in a hung Parliament, have been controversial, with several serious allegations of widespread rigging to alter the results.