LAHORE:
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has formally withdrawn the schedule for Punjab’s local government elections, confirming The Express Tribune’s earlier report that the passage of the Punjab Local Government Act 2025 would once again derail grassroots democracy in the province.
In a meeting chaired by Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sikandar Sultan Raja, the ECP reviewed the situation arising from the new law’s enactment.
Members of the commission, along with the secretary and senior officials, were briefed in detail on the legal and administrative implications for the ongoing election process.
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According to an official statement, the Punjab Assembly’s passage and the governor’s assent to the 2025 Act have effectively repealed the Punjab Local Government Act 2022, under which the ECP had already begun delimitations.
With the earlier law now nullified, the commission decided to retract the delimitation schedule announced in September for the planned December elections.
“The schedule for local government elections in Punjab has been withdrawn,” the ECP said in its statement. “The Punjab government has been granted four weeks to frame delimitation and demarcation rules under the 2025 Act. No further extensions will be given.”
Officials confirmed that the decision was taken at the Punjab government’s request, which sought additional time to prepare rules and finalise administrative arrangements under the new legislation.
All delimitation work across the province has now been halted until the new framework is completed.
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The ECP further noted that if the Punjab government fails to submit the rules within four weeks, the matter would be taken up again for review and further direction.
The decision validates The Express Tribune’s October 13 report, which warned that the hasty passage of the Punjab Local Government Act 2025 had “thrown the ongoing delimitation process and planned December elections into limbo”.
That report also detailed how the law was pushed through amid opposition uproar, with critics accusing the treasury benches of deliberately delaying polls and undermining local governance.
With the ECP’s formal confirmation, Punjab’s local government elections now face an indefinite delay, the fourth such postponement in roughly a decade. The province last held local polls in 2015 under the 2013 Act.
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The PTI’s 2019 legislation dissolved those elected bodies prematurely, promising a new system that never materialised. After the PTI’s ouster, the PML-N-led coalition passed the 2022 Act, which also failed to yield elections amid administrative and procedural disputes.
Analysts say the recurring cycle of legislative changes has eroded public trust in the political commitment to devolved governance. They argue that successive governments, regardless of party, have used legal manoeuvring to retain financial and administrative control that constitutionally belongs to local institutions.
“The government keeps rewriting the law to buy time and keep power at the top,” said one political observer familiar with Punjab’s local government system. “This pattern has effectively sidelined the idea of grassroots democracy.”
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For Punjab’s 120 million residents, the continued absence of elected local representatives means daily civic issues – sanitation, zoning and development planning – remain in bureaucratic hands rather than accountable public offices.
For now, all eyes are on the Punjab government’s ability to finalise delimitation rules within the four-week deadline. Whether this latest reform leads to elections or resets the clock once again will test the province’s long-standing promise of restoring local democracy.
