Point taken, but it still leaves Bhutto’s faction near powerless.
Not necessarily. Her son and husband have already taken the reins, and my slight understanding of the situation says that Pakistani politics turn quite a lot on dynasties, so their presence would keep a lot of her power base where it is. The problem is that her husband has a cloud of corruption charges over his head, and her son is all of 19 years old. When the son can actually take over the party, they’d probably have a better chance, but I’m not sure they can get back to where she was for the coming election.
Then again, backlash against Musharraf for his recent state of emergency and now his delaying of the elections may change things around as well.
I don’t believe that for a second. Unless, of course your willing to amend your statement to clarify that your attributing that belief to Pakistan only. Huckabee’s got little money and doing great in the Iowa polls and Ron Paul’s got more campaign funds than he knows what to do with but can’t pull out of the single digits, so I don’t see how you can say money is more of a determining factor than the votes of the people.
Your view seems so cynical and pessimistic. Maybe she left her safety abroad in order to better her country? Maybe she was interested in the future of her country?
Pakistan is not the same as America, though. They don’t have a real democracy where the votes are actually counted.
I said, “The outcome of elections is determined by who has the most money <i>and the most support from significant social powers</i>.” In fact this generalizes quite well to any society, the thing that changes is the social powers. “The people,” when considered as a whole, are almost never a social power in and of themselves. They are divided among different social powers, which have the money and the political organization.
In Pakistan, the social powers are Islamic organizations, tribal leaders, and the military. In America, the biggest social powers are corporations and the offices of the government itself (these days it’s hard to tell the difference, the private and public sector aren’t so clearly separated), and to a lesser degree, some unions and religious organizations. Between them, these social powers form the entirety of the political discourse. The elections are not simply a direct interaction between the candidates and “the people.” They don’t take place in an information vacuum. The views of every leading candidate are also promoted by an endless procession of papers, reports, books, radio and TV shows, and so forth, which are churned out by whatever social powers the candidate represents. Ron Paul, even with his Internet money, doesn’t have access to a fraction of the same resources.
In Pakistan, the opposition of the social powers is inevitably much sharper than in America. America has a very strong national identity – there are differences between regions, but not big enough to fight over these days, and becoming less pronounced as time goes by. But many Middle Eastern countries were created artificially, pieced together from haphazard remnants of various empires. Any attempt to create an artificial national identity there will run into numerous deep and long-running historical conflicts.
Elections, even if they’re honest, do not resolve these historical conflicts by themselves. Once the winner gets access to the bureaucratic apparatus of the government, he will use it against the opposing sides. And yes, the winner will always be from one of the sides – if a politician does not have the support of at least one of the significant social powers, he’ll be gone long before the election.
I’m sure she was. For that matter, so is Musharraf. The fact remains, however, that no one ever gets to be a serious politician in Pakistan without understanding and following the basic rules of the game.