PTI nominates party secretary Omar Ayub as Pakistan PM candidate

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) has nominated the party’s general secretary Omar Ayub as its prime ministerial candidate. Party leader Asad Qaiser made the announcement earlier today days after PML-N picked Shehbaz Sharif as their prime ministerial candidate. Independent candidates backed by Imran Khan’s PTI have won 101 out of 266 National Assembly seats. The party is planning to form its government in the Central, Punjab, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa regions. PTI-supported candidates contested as independents due to the party’s loss of its election symbol, the ‘bat’, amid controversies surrounding its intra-party elections. Qaiser also said that former Prime Minister Imran Khan would soon announce the date of a nationwide protest against the alleged rigging of poll results in the February 8 elections. Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Bilawal Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) have agreed to form a coalition government in the nation. Who is Omar Ayub? Omar Ayub, the grandson of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister and Field Marshal Ayub Khan, was initially a member of the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) before he joined PTI in 2018. In 2002, Ayub contested Pakistan’s National Assembly following which he served as a cabinet minister during former prime minister Shaukat Aziz’s rule. He has held several important portfolios throughout his political career including Minister for Economic Affairs, Minister for Energy, and Minister for Petroleum.