ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Bhutto has said that the choice between parliamentary and presidential forms of democracy “will best be left to the electorate”. The Prime Minister told [the ‘Teheran Journal’] … that this issue would not be raised by the People’s Party in the coming elections. Mr Bhutto was asked … if he thought there was a chance of moving towards a different type of democratic system. Mr Bhutto said that he believed that some people might raise the question whether we should or should not have a presidential form of government. However, [he] said that this question “would not be raised by my Party”.

Pointing out that former President Ayub Khan’s was not a genuine presidential system, Mr Bhutto said that when the People’s Party went to the electorate “we had no alternative but to go for the parliamentary system because there was so much antipathy to Ayub Khan’s presidential form of government, that all parties in the last elections had said in their manifesto that they would go back to the parliamentary system”. “Secondly,” Mr Bhutto added, “East Pakistan was part of Pakistan and in a parliamentary system it was easier to divide power between the two Wings.”

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2026