Syed Iftikhar Ali Gillani wins the Muzaffarabad premiership 30-14

Syed Iftikhar Ali Gillani was elected prime minister of the Pakistan-administered assembly in Muzaffarabad on Friday, 28 August, with 30 votes to 14 for Mukhtar Ahmed Abbasi of the Pakistan Peoples Party. The election commission and regional officials confirmed the count to the Associated Press. Forty-four members voted. The speaker did not vote. PML-N regional president Shah Ghulam Qadir stayed away after a fight inside his own party.

The house has 53 seats on paper. Its present strength is 46 because seven seats in Poonch and Sudhnoti have not been filled. Authorities blamed a law-and-order problem for the delay. Direct polls for 38 of 45 constituencies ran in phases on 27 July, 2 August and 3 August. PML-N took 25 of those 38. The PPP took 12. Awami Dast-o-Bazu took one and backed PML-N. Of eight reserved seats already allotted, PML-N took six and the PPP two. The result returns Nawaz Sharif’s party to the Muzaffarabad office after ten years.

Gillani is 46, a barrister trained in Britain. He won a Muzaffarabad seat in 2011, kept it in 2016 and served five years as education minister. He lost in 2021 and again in the 2026 direct vote, then entered the house on a technocrat seat. Nawaz Sharif named him on Thursday after Shehbaz Sharif called speaker Tariq Farooq, deputy speaker Ahmed Raza Qadri, Qadir and former premier Raja Farooq Haider to a meeting. Haider and Qadir opposed the pick and said they would sit out the vote. The speaker moved the ballot from Thursday to Friday.

The polls ran under a boycott call from the outlawed Joint Awami Action Committee, which has held rallies in the region since early June. Several protesters and security staff have been killed in that unrest. The Hindu, filing from Islamabad, called the vote marred by violent protest and rigging charges. Those charges are allegations, not findings. What is on the record is the boycott, the unfilled seats, the internal PML-N split, and a 30-14 result in a house that is not at full strength.

Shehbaz Sharif congratulated Gillani. India does not recognise the office. New Delhi’s line is that the territory is occupied. Pakistan’s line is that the assembly is the elected government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Both states claim the whole former princely state. They have fought two of their three wars over it. Friday’s vote does not move that map. It installs a 46-year-old lawyer, chosen in Islamabad after the regional party president was passed over, in a capital where seven seats are still empty and a banned committee is still in the street.