What the commentators said
It’s easy to see why Khan’s “stunning” victory attracted global coverage, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. The story of a cricketing hero turned political superstar and “scourge of the establishment” that produced him is too good to miss. But it’s also because “Pakistan matters”. Khan inherits an impoverished country of 200 million people located at a pivotal point in the Asian landmass. For China, it is a key link in its “grandiose” plans to build a global trading empire; for India, it is a “nuclear-armed bogeyman”; for America, it’s both an “indispensable ally and a duplicitous villain” in its Afghan adventures. That’s why Pakistan’s new leader is an object of such fascination to the world’s press, said Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times. “Who is the real Imran Khan?”, they want to know. To some, he’s the clean-living sportsman who led his country to victory in the 1992 World Cup, built a cancer hospital in memory of his mother, and then dedicated his life to battling corruption. To others, he’s no more than an opportunist who sold out to the army in his desperation to win power.
What’s certain is that Khan is no West-leaning liberal, said Jeffrey Gettleman in The New York Times. True, he won’t feel out of place among “Western power brokers”. He was educated at Oxford; his first wife was the socialite Jemima Khan. (He’s now married to Bushra Maneka, a faith healer.) But today he professes sympathy for the Taliban and for Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws, and is a fierce critic of US drone attacks. The former playboy who counted Princess Diana among his friends has undergone a metamorphosis, said Omar Waraich in The Independent: hence his appeal to religious conservatives and nationalists. Yet his attraction extends to a wide variety of Pakistanis, from celebrities to rich businessmen to factory workers. The country’s endemic corruption – the last PM, Nawaz Sharif, is serving a ten-year term for graft – has left voters from all backgrounds yearning for that rare being in Pakistani politics: an honest leader.