Pakistan Peoples Party chairperson Benazir Bhutto has claimed to have secured a "verbal" agreement from her principal rival for the prime ministership of Pakistan to a power-sharing arrangement that would see her have first crack at running the country for five years.
In an interview with the British daily Financial Times, Bhutto said that she and Nawaz Sharif, the exiled leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (N), had struck the bargain so that they could present a common front in their battle to reassert civilian control over the army.
Any such arrangement would go far beyond the published terms of the Charter of Democracy - a 36-point common programme to "save the motherland from the clutches of military dictatorship" - that Bhutto and Sharif signed in May 2006.
"Both of us are committed to reforming the military establishment. So I hope that we will have a consensus within the parliament on the reforms that we are going to bring and that the military would not be able to play one of us off against the other," she said.
"Nawaz Sharif and I agree. Nawaz says, 'You should be the prime minister for the first five-year term', and after that five-year term he wants to run. So I hope that we can move forward. That's a verbal discussion between us but that is what he has said to me."
But Iqbal Zafar Jhagra, the secretary-general of the PML (N), denied there was any such offer from Sharif. The claim and counter-claim illustrate the tensions between opposition groups as they jockey for position in a fast-changing political scene.
"The people will decide in fair elections, who forms the government," he said. "If she forms the government, Sharif has said we will respect her mandate, or that of anyone else elected by the people. This is a new development in Pakistani politics."
For either to become prime minister would require General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's embattled president, to reverse his position that neither of the former prime ministers will be allowed back into the country and to rescind a law barring them from a third term.
General Musharraf is under US pressure to honour a pledge to step out of uniform by December, allow back the two exiled leaders and abandon plans to be re-elected by the outgoing parliament before fresh elections throw up a less favourable electoral college.
Bhutto, who has served as prime minister twice, between 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1996, acknowledged that the PPP had been discussing a possible deal with General Musharraf that would enable him to continue as president, provided he agreed to quit as army chief.
"We've had discussions but they have not moved forward," she said. "We've left all options open. We may abstain or we may resign. To say that we've decided not to vote against him would be wrong."
A poll published in April by the Washington-based International Republican Institute showed the PPP to be the most popular party, with support from 25.7 percent of sampled voters, an increase of nearly four points on the IRI's September 2006 poll.
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