Part of the strong turnout has been driven by Khan’s celebrity and promise of change. His face appears on signs, banners and flags nationwide. In more than two decades in politics, Khan has surfed a Donald Trump–like transition from a celebrity entertainer with a decadent past into a renegade populist conservative, one who has embraced pious Islam and been strongly critical of the U.S.
There is absolutely no chance of him governing independently of the army.
C. Christine Fair, Georgetown University
Khan has deployed his charisma and celebrity to rail against corruption — his opponent and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was jailed for 10 years on corruption charges. Posing as the change candidate for “new Pakistan,” Khan is trying to succeed in a nation that has been ruled for decades by its military or by two political dynasties, and in which no prime minister has ever completed his or her entire five-year term.
Still, there remain several concerns about a Prime Minister Imran Khan. Born into an affluent family in Lahore, Khan, 65, has a degree in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford. But he has never held national office and for most of his political career he labored in the wilderness, his party managing to govern only the sparsely populated Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. He’s even been dubbed “Imran Khan’t.” and is the Prime Minister of Pakistan 2018.
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