Lawmakers from the party of slain former Pakistan premier Benazir Bhutto on Friday unanimously nominated her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, to run for president, a government minister said. “Zardari thanked Pakistan People's Party of which he is the co-chairman and said he will announce his decision within the next 24 hours,” information minister Sherry Rehman told reporters in Islamabad. She said party members unanimously nominated Zardari as their presidential candidate during a meeting of the grouping's central executive committee. Pakistan will hold a presidential election on September 6 to pick a successor to Pervez Musharraf, who resigned this week to avoid impeachment charges. Under Pakistan's constitution, the new president must be elected by a simultaneous sitting of the upper and lower houses of the national parliament and the country's four provincial assemblies. Nomination papers will be reviewed on August 28 and the final date for any withdrawals is August 30. “Presidency is the right of our party and that is why party lawmakers asked Zardari to run for this post,” Rehman said. The announcement came as key coalition partner Nawaz Sharif set a deadline next Wednesday for the reinstatement of judges sacked by Musharraf last year, an issue that threatens to tear apart the ruling alliance. Sharif had previously threatened to quit the coalition if they were not restored by Friday. Sharif said that representatives of his and Bhutto's party would draft a resolution on restoring the judges over the weekend and then introduce it in parliament on Monday, with a vote on Wednesday. “Wednesday should be the day for reinstatement of judges,” Sharif told a news conference after meeting the leaders of two smaller parties in the coalition, who had been trying to mediate on the dispute. “We do not want to quit the coalition and wish to go along with our coalition partners,” Sharif said. But the PPP has shown no sign yet of keeping the pledge that it made in May to restore the judges. Critics have suggested that Zardari does not want chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry to come back because he could overturn an amnesty on corruption charges that Musharraf granted Bhutto and Zardari last year. The amnesty allowed Bhutto and Zardari to return from years in exile in return for an agreement on a power-sharing deal with Musharraf, which later collapsed. Bhutto was killed in a suicide attack in December and the parties in the coalition defeated Musharraf's allies in elections two months later. A double Taleban suicide bombing at Pakistan's biggest weapons factory on Thursday, the deadliest ever attack on a Pakistani military site, has put fresh pressure on the coalition to end its bickering.
