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Sudan Events \u2013 Sumaya Sayed<\/strong><\/p>\n Pakistan\u2019s former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, whose party is considered a front-runner to win general elections in February, will kick off his campaign next week, aides said, days after the Supreme Court cleared him to run for a fourth term.<\/p>\n The campaign for the February 8 poll, delayed since November, looks set to fire up a lackluster race in an uncertain political environment after Sharif\u2019s main rival and former premier Imran Khan, was jailed and disqualified from contesting.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will, God willing, start our mass campaign on January 15,\u201d Pervaiz Rashid, a close Sharif aide told Reuters, adding that the former premier would speak at a rally two days later.<\/p>\n Analysts believe the South Asian nation\u2019s powerful military has thrown its backing to Sharif, 74, after it was locked in a standoff with former cricket star Khan, 71.<\/p>\n That gives Sharif an edge in a country where army generals mostly decide on making or breaking governments.<\/p>\n \u201cSharif is a front-runner because he and his party are back in the military\u2019s good graces,\u201d said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia specialist at Washington think tank the Wilson Center.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the polarized, vendetta-driven environment of Pakistani politics, it is brutally simple: Nawaz is a bitter rival of Imran Khan, and that serves the army well, which turned on Khan and doesn\u2019t want him to return to power.\u201d<\/p>\n The military\u2019s public relations wing did not respond to a request for a comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sudan Events \u2013 Sumaya Sayed Pakistan\u2019s former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, whose party is considered a front-runner to win general elections in February, will kick off his campaign next week, aides said, days after the Supreme Court cleared him to run for a fourth term. The campaign for the February 8 poll, delayed since …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10971"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10973,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10971\/revisions\/10973"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}