Pakistan does not need a stronger ruler. It needs a stronger system. For nearly eight decades, Pakistan has changed governments, constitutions, political alliances and balances of institutional power, yet the central governance problem has proved remarkably persistent; the difficulty of producing stable, accountable and consistently competent government. The question is therefore no longer simply who should govern, but how Pakistan should be governed. We have also tended to treat democracy and parliamentary government as though they were synonymous. They are not. Parliamentary government is one institutional form through which democracy may be organised; presidential government is another. To question the Westminster-derived system is not to question democracy. It is to ask whether the machinery through which we have practiced it remains suited to the Pakistan we have become.

Britain’s parliamentary system emerged from a particular history, political culture, party structure and civil service. Pakistan’s experience has been different. Here executive survival is inseparable from parliamentary arithmetic: prime ministers govern only while maintaining legislative majorities, and political energy is consumed by coalition management, constituency bargaining, allocations, appointments and the preservation of numbers. Legislators who should principally legislate, scrutinise expenditure and hold the executive accountable are simultaneously drawn into executive power and patronage.

A presidential system offers a different constitutional architecture. The executive and legislature derive separate mandates from the electorate. The president serves a fixed term; Parliament legislates and scrutinises; the judiciary interprets and protects the Constitution. Separation does not eliminate political conflict, but it can make responsibility easier to identify and power more visible. The familiar objection is that presidentialism risks one-man rule. It can, if badly designed. Executive authority can become personalised; separately elected presidents and legislatures can deadlock; and weak institutions can be overwhelmed by an ambitious executive. But authoritarian concentration is not unique to presidential systems. Parliamentary democracies can also produce elected leaders who accumulate power, weaken institutional checks and govern with increasingly autocratic instincts. The real question is therefore not simply whether a system is presidential or parliamentary, but whether institutions are strong enough to restrain those who wield executive power.

Pakistan should contemplate not an all-powerful president but a constitutionally bounded, directly elected chief executive serving a fixed term under strict term limits. Parliament would........

© The Friday Times