PML-N's Iftikhar Gillani elected prime minister of Pakistan-administered Kashmir

Lawmakers in Muzaffarabad elected Barrister Syed Iftikhar Ali Gillani prime minister of Pakistan-administered Kashmir on Friday. Gillani, a Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz member nominated by Nawaz Sharif a day earlier, took 30 of the 44 votes cast. Sardar Mukhtar Ahmed Abbasi of the Pakistan Peoples Party took 14.

Acting president Chaudhry Tariq Farooq administered the oath. Speaker Chaudhry Tariq Farooq announced the count. The assembly has 53 seats on paper and 46 in practice. Elections for seven seats in Poonch and Sudhnoti have not been held. The speaker did not vote. PML-N regional president Shah Ghulam Qadir stayed away after a dispute with his own party. That left 44 ballots.

Gillani's win returns PML-N to the regional premiership after a decade. Direct elections to 38 constituencies, run in three phases on 27 July, 2 August and 3 August, gave PML-N 25 seats and the PPP 12. The Awami Dast-o-Bazu party won one seat and backed PML-N. Of eight reserved seats already filled, PML-N took six and the PPP two. Combined with allies, that produced the 32-to-14 split Dawn recorded on Saturday.

The polls followed a boycott call by the outlawed Joint Awami Action Committee. JAAC has held rallies across the region since early June. Several protesters and security officials have been killed. Pakistani authorities described the delay in Poonch and Sudhnoti as a law-and-order problem. Opposition parties and the committee called the phased votes rigged. Those claims have not been tested in a court that both sides accept.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif congratulated Gillani. So did outgoing premier Raja Faisal Mumtaz Rathore, a PPP man who had held the post since 17 November 2025. Wikipedia's running list treats Friday as a change of incumbent after Rathore's tenure, not as a mid-term defection inside the same cabinet. Chaudhry Muhammad Yasin of the PPP was named opposition leader.

Gillani pledged jobs, merit, transparency and a digital economy in his first remarks. Dawn noted that he personally drove to the house of Raja Farooq Haider, a party elder who had reservations about the nomination, and brought him to the session. That detail matters inside PML-N more than it matters in Delhi or Srinagar. The old guard had to be seen in the hall for the 30-vote margin to look settled.

India does not recognise the Muzaffarabad assembly or the title it confers. The Hindu's Saturday report put the office in quotation marks and used the phrase Pakistan-occupied Kashmir throughout. The Associated Press used Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Both countries claim the former princely state in full. They have fought three wars since 1947, two of them over Kashmir. Friday's vote does not change that legal map. It does change who signs files in the Prime Minister Secretariat in Domail.

The unfinished business is the seven empty seats and the JAAC protests that emptied them. A government sworn in on 44 votes can pass a budget. It cannot claim a quiet mandate in Poonch. Gillani's first test is whether he treats those districts as a polling delay or as a political revolt that the phased election failed to absorb.

For Islamabad the result is simpler. The ruling federal party now holds the regional premiership again. That alignment is what Nawaz Sharif wanted when he put Gillani's name forward on Thursday. The cost is a legislature that still has holes, a boycott movement that has not stood down, and a neighbour that will not use the title the assembly just conferred.