Islamabad: Going by opinion polls, the party backing President Pervez Musharraf will lose when Pakistan votes today, but a handful of powerful families could deliver enough seats to buttress the unpopular president's position.
Musharraf and his political allies get blamed for almost everything in Pakistan; inflation, shortages of staple food, power cuts, Islamist militancy and the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
But that could have little bearing in the parliamentary polls because of Pakistan's unrepresentative and oligarchic power structure.
Land-owning families known as feudals wield enough influence in their rural fiefdoms to defy the tide of public sentiment.
"They have a powerful hold on these constituencies where they field themselves as candidates and that's an extremely important factor," said political analyst and academic Rasul Baksh Rais.
Former president Farooq Leghari is typical of the rural families that dominate politics in the main battleground province of Punjab, where half the members of parliament will be elected.
"Whatever development you see is because of me or my father," Leghari in a recent interview at his home in Dera Ghazi Khan district on the west bank of the Indus river. "Whatever hospitals you see, even those in bad shape, whatever schools you see, they were built at our initiative."
Leghari is the respected sardar, or chief, of his ethnic Baloch tribe, and is standing as a candidate for the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League.
