The coalition Government looks incapable of providing any leadership at all.  Four months after the elections it is not just grappling with constitutional issues but struggling to make basic decisions.  Many reckon that it will fall soon.

Anyone would grant Pakistan some time, in principle, to sort out its Government after the past nine years under military rule.  But it doesn’t have that leisure.  Terrorism is still a threat, even though the religious parties are waning, while rising food and fuel prices are bringing unrest and wiping out eight years of economic gain.

Nawaz Sharif, leader of the conservative Pakistan Muslim League, one of the two main parties, maintains that a deal has now been struck on restoring the Supreme Court judges, sacked by President Pervez Musharraf last year.  On Wednesday, in London, he said that he had agreed with Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower and now head of her Pakistan People’s Party, that all judges would be restored by May 12.

It is not that simple.  Sharif says, after talks with Zardari in Dubai, that he is confident that the deal will stick.  But many are not.  The date already represents a 12-day extension on the previous deadline that the Government set itself.  It is hard to see how it will meet the new one.  Zardari, no fan of the judiciary after years of imprisonment, wants its powers curbed.  He also wants all the judges appointed by Musharraf to be kept in place, swelling the Supreme Court from 17 to 26.  This would take a constitutional amendment, and so a two-thirds majority of parliament, which cannot be taken for granted.

Sharif, implacably opposed to Musharraf, who deposed him in the 1999 coup, hopes that the restitution of the judges will get rid of the President, or at least curtail his power.  While careful not to assume that, he asserts that “the nation will feel very happy that the sanctity of the judiciary has been restored, that a dictator has been defeated”.

He has the constitution on his side, but not politics.  Zardari, as leader of the most powerful party, has spent much of April talking with President Musharraf, about judges and wider cooperation.  In being prepared to deal with Musharraf, Zardari is only following in the footsteps of Bhutto.  Although he has none of her charisma, popularity, or intellectual sophistication, he has proved much more successful than expected in handling the intricacies of Pakistani politics.  His party has already struck a deal with the MQM, the secular, Karachi-based party, as well as making overtures to a splinter of the MMA, the group of religious parties, and the Awami National Party in the North West Frontier Province.  The outlines of a coalition that would accommodate Musharraf, but shut out Sharif, are visible.

A year ago, in a Times interview in London, Sharif was bitter, preoccupied with revenge against Musharraf.  In an interview in September he was ebullient beyond restraint at the prospect of returning from exile – but Musharraf deported him to Saudi Arabia as his aircraft landed.  This month, he is careful and muted, and still fixed on Musharraf.  “The mandate given to us by the people of Pakistan was a mandate for change.”  The elections, just weeks after the assassination of Bhutto, gave her party and Sharif’s a huge boost while humiliating Musharraf’s party.  “They do not want the same old faces,” he says, without irony, although as a twice-former Prime Minister he counts as one of the old faces, in a country that badly needs new ones.

But while he makes a better speech about democracy than Zardari – or Musharraf – he is vague on what he thinks should be done about schools, or rising fuel costs (and rising budget deficits as the Government subsidises the cost).  His son Hasan fills in detail of the economic achievements of past Sharif governments; as well as explaining the difference between texting and e-mailing to his father.  He says that his past Government should be enough of a guide.  But no politician can afford such glibness: in Sharif’s case, it risks making him obsessed with the past at the expense of the future.  The risk for him is that if this coalition fails, there are many who would formally try to consign him to the past.