MQM has always gone back and forth. It is bottled up in Karachi and has to see whether the center or the provincial government offers it the best support so they can run the city. This was why they went along with PTI at the center because a lot of promises were made and nothing came of it (what happened to the Rs 1.1 Trillion uplift plan? Nothing!) Next up was knocking on PPP's door which is where things were but nobody is happy with the current state of affairs.MQM backstabbing PTI was last straw for it. You have to understand the reason why. When MQM would inevitably make a coalition with PPP before, after complaining to no end about how PPP gives them no power to fix things in Karachi, people would say, okay they have no alternative.
Now when they went back on PTI to join up with PPP again who we all know is directly responsible for the condition in Karachi, they lost ALL their credibility. You can put all the MQM parties together. They will get wiped out in Karachi. PTI may have not fulfilled all their promises- but they did pay attention to Karachi as much as they could - intact, pushing for digital census that was demand of Karachites. PTI does need to focus more on Karachi. But there is no way that people will give those beghairat MQM wallay anymore chances.
Wait and see what happens. If anything, it will be PTI that will see erosion of its vote-bank in Karachi because Karachi isn't just Defense and Clifton where the PTI base is concentrated. MQM lost its footing in the city because the establishment's full weight was behind PTI in the past with most of MQM leadership in jail, hiding or overseas. All of these splits engineered on MQM also diminished its ability to present itself as a single unified party.
So I would caution people willing to write it off as some sort of eventuality. It is not. Perhaps a good competition in Karachi between PTI, MQM and PPP may play out well but at the end of the day, nobody can do anything for the city for as long as the 18th amendment keeps all the power with the PPP provincial government. Their CM will continue to make life miserable for whoever tries to run Karachi. So whether its MQM or PTI, Karachi's fortunes are not turning.
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