New Year, New Start — Zardari's Days Look Numbered

As 2011 began, Pakistan's political landscape was shifting in ways that made Asif Ali Zardari's continuation as president look increasingly precarious. The coalition that had brought the Pakistan Peoples Party to power after the 2008 elections had never been stable, and by the turn of the year the strains were visible across multiple dimensions simultaneously.

The PPP government was struggling on virtually every front that mattered to ordinary Pakistanis: electricity shortages had reached crisis proportions, with load-shedding of twelve to sixteen hours daily in many cities; inflation was running at levels that eroded living standards continuously; and the security situation remained dire, with Taliban and sectarian violence claiming lives regularly across the country.

Zardari's personal unpopularity — rooted in his widely earned reputation for corruption dating back to the 1990s, when he earned the nickname "Mr. Ten Percent" — never improved sufficiently to give him a political base independent of his late wife Benazir Bhutto's legacy. He governed as the custodian of a political dynasty rather than as a leader with his own mandate, and the distinction showed.

The MQM's decision to leave the coalition government in early January 2011 triggered a confidence crisis that required weeks of political maneuvering to resolve. The army, which had never been fully reconciled to civilian control under any Pakistani government, watched the civilian dysfunction with barely concealed institutional impatience.

Whether Zardari would complete his term remained genuinely uncertain as the year opened. Pakistan's political history offered little comfort to presidents who had lost their coalition's cohesion.

In the event, the obituaries were premature: Zardari survived the January crisis — the MQM returned to the coalition within days — and went on to complete his full term in September 2013, the first democratically elected president of Pakistan to do so.