THE BY-ELECTIONS HAVE DONE something politics rarely does in Pakistan: they have cut through the noise. For months, the national discourse has been drowned in slogans, social media trends, and sweeping claims of “mass popularity” and “stolen mandates.” But when the ballot boxes were opened, a quieter, more stubborn truth emerged. Voters did not endorse a politics built on perpetual confrontation, institutional breakdown, and online theatre. They chose, instead, continuity, relative stability, and those who were at least seen to be governing rather than burning the stage down.
At the heart of this result lies a rejection of what many Pakistanis have come to see as PTI’s “siyasat-e-inteshar” – a politics of unrest and permanent agitation. For years, PTI’s central strategy has been escalation: long marches, nightly tirades, attacks on institutions, and then, at its ugliest, the May 9 episode that still hangs over the party like a shadow. The by-election outcome shows that while anger against the system exists, voters do not necessarily want to weaponise that anger against the state itself. They may resent inflation, they may distrust elites, but they are not prepared to sign up indefinitely to a project that appears to have no off-ramp from confrontation and no credible plan for day-to-day governance.
Closely tied to this is the public’s growing fatigue with the foreign-boosted, anti-state social media campaign that has attempted to substitute virality for legitimacy. For months, timelines have been flooded with slick videos, coordinated trends in odd time zones, and talking points that sound less like organic Pakistani political language and more like outsourced scripts. Ordinary voters may not be media experts, but they can sense when politics is being outsourced to anonymous handles and when criticism of institutions crosses from reformist to openly incendiary. The by-elections suggest a quiet backlash: people are tired of being told by faceless accounts that their own army, courts, and electoral institutions are irredeemable enemies. That kind of messaging can go viral; it does not easily translate into votes.
The PTI camp misread this mood. They assumed that dominance on X or TikTok would automatically convert into dominance at the ballot box, that trending hashtags in English would somehow overwrite entrenched political networks in Haripur, Faisalabad, Lahore, Sahiwal, and D.G. Khan. But voters standing in line in village schools and city polling stations do not vote on VPN signals; they vote on who paved the road, who helped in the last medical emergency, who can get a transformer fixed, who can get a transfer done, who shows up in a crisis. Against this granular calculus, a foreign-amplified campaign that spends its energy insulting institutions and glorifying “resistance” ends up feeling detached, even irresponsible.
Nowhere is the gap between rhetoric and reality clearer than in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. PTI has ruled KP for over a decade; it is the one province where they had both time and mandate to model the “Naya Pakistan” they promised. Instead, voters in places like Haripur have watched poor governance accumulate: broken infrastructure, fragile services, a security environment that has again become uneasy, and a provincial administration more focused on political theatre than technocratic delivery. When the PTI campaign tried to present Haripur as a plebiscite on “haqiqi azadi,” many residents quietly treated it as a referendum on school quality, basic healthcare, peace, and economic prospects – and answered in the negative.
The Haripur result is particularly instructive. Omar Ayub was no minor figure; he was opposition leader in the National Assembly and a central face of the PTI narrative. His wife entered the race, campaigned aggressively, and secured well over 100,000 votes – an undeniably strong showing that proves PTI’s vote bank is real and mobilised. But in a race they themselves framed as a decisive battle, she still lost. That loss was not because people stayed home; it was because enough people went out and chose someone else. You cannot call it a boycott when you are running camps, holding corner meetings, and your candidate crosses the six-figure mark in votes.
This is why the “we boycotted” line now being floated by PTI is so obviously defensive. A boycott is a political weapon used before an election: you refuse to contest, you refuse to legitimise the process, you instruct supporters to stay away. PTI did the opposite. They set up polling camps, plastered walls with posters, and turned the contests in Haripur and Lahore into prestige battles. Only after the defeat did the word “boycott” re-appear, repackaged as a face-saving device to explain away uncomfortable numbers. You cannot collect ballot papers all day and invoke boycott at night.
In contrast, the party that benefited most from these by-elections, PML-N, did not pretend that social media trends would save it. It fought an old-fashioned ground war: selecting candidates entrenched in their constituencies, leveraging local biradari networks, working their municipal record, and running a narrative rooted in governance and delivery. Whatever one thinks of PML-N’s wider record, voters in much of Punjab clearly credit them with roads, energy projects, and a basic sense of administrative order. In Punjab especially, the by-election results read like a public endorsement of Maryam Nawaz’s early months in office: the “performance as narrative” strategy is, at least for now, biting more strongly than PTI’s “victimhood as narrative.”
This is why Maryam’s framing of the by-elections as a “referendum” was not just rhetoric. In seat after seat, PML-N candidates were not winning by a whisker; they were consolidating margins, often against PTI-backed figures who were loudly claiming moral victory even before polling day. The voters’ answer was unambiguous: given a choice between a party that is actually running governments in Islamabad and Lahore – with all their flaws – and a party that spends most of its political capital attacking institutions and nursing a sense of grievance, they opted for the former. It is less a vote of love and more a vote of preference for order over chaos.
The KP-Punjab contrast is especially sharp. In KP, PTI had every opportunity to show how its anti-status quo rhetoric could be translated into better hospitals, safer streets, stronger local governments, and more transparent policing. Instead, what many citizens experienced was drift: institutional weakening, politicisation of bureaucracy, and a leadership more invested in national-level confrontation than provincial-level problem-solving. In Punjab, by comparison, PML-N’s long-standing habit of treating governance as a tangible, visible project – motorways, metro lines, district-level schemes – continues to pay dividends. It is not ideological; it is transactional, and voters clearly value that transaction.
The foreign-inflected social media campaign against Pakistan’s institutions has also done PTI deeper strategic damage than its architects may have realised. Criticising the excesses of the state is one thing; crafting an online ecosystem in which the army, courts, and election machinery are portrayed as inherently illegitimate is another. For many ordinary Pakistanis – who may distrust individual decisions but still see the state as their only shield in a dangerous neighbourhood – this crosses a line. The by-elections indicate that when voters were asked, implicitly, to choose between a party that constantly tells them their own state is the enemy and a party that seeks to work within that state, they leaned toward the latter.
None of this means the story is over. PTI still commands a substantial vote bank, as the Haripur numbers alone prove. The anger it channels is real: fury at economic hardship, disgust at elite impunity, frustration with a system that seems to shut doors on new entrants. But the by-elections show that anger without responsibility is not enough. When the moment comes to stamp a symbol on a ballot paper, many Pakistanis are not willing to gamble on permanent crisis. They might flirt with inteshar in the streets or on their phones; in the secrecy of the polling booth, they often return to the unglamorous choice of stability.
In that sense, the most important message from these by-elections is not simply “PML-N won, PTI lost.” It is that a critical slice of the electorate still wants politics to be about solving problems, not multiplying them. They are willing to punish poor governance – as KP’s trajectory shows – and reward what they perceive as better performance, as in Punjab. They are increasingly sceptical of imported outrage and algorithm-driven mobilisation. And they are unimpressed by post-facto excuses of boycotts where none existed. Behind the slogans and trends, the Pakistani voter has quietly delivered a verdict: chaos may dominate the conversation, but competence still wins the count. ∎
