Guardian: Imran Khan reaches out to young voters with 'third-way'.

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Imran Khan reaches out to young voters with 'third-way' in Pakistan's general election​

Cricketing hero wins hearts with promises to empower the people, but can sentiment be turned into seats for his PTI party?

Mohammed Saeed had been waiting all day. Early that morning the 27-year-old bakery worker had cycled from his home on the outskirts of Okara, a rural town in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province, to the scruffy crossroads at its centre. Now, as evening came, the man he had come to see was only 100 metres away, standing on the roof of his campaign bus.

"We want to make a new Pakistan," Imran Khan shouted. "You have to make this new Pakistan for your future." Saeed cheered. "He's right," he said, "We have to make our own future."

Okara was the third of five stops for the cricketer turned politician that day. The pace of campaigning is accelerating, as the general election in the troubled, strategically situated nuclear power draws nearer.

For more than four decades the Pakistan Peoples party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) have alternated in power between periods of military rule. Now Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Pakistan Movement for Justice, offers voters a third option.

Khan's campaign has triggered a wave of enthusiasm, particularly among younger voters. Nearly 35% of the 85 million people registered to take part in the elections are under 30 and nearly 60% under 40. As Khan's campaign convoy wends its way through the towns of central Punjab it is preceded by a swarm of excited young men on motorbikes – as well as pickup trucks full of armed commandos.

"He will win here because he is new and energetic and people are fed up with previous rulers," said Mushtaq Haq, another onlooker in Okara. A stagnant economy, massive power shortages and extremist violence are largely blamed on the PPP, in power at the national level for the past five years.

Khan started the day at the home he built for himself and his family in Islamabad, the capital, before his divorce from Jemima Goldsmith in 2004.

PTI now has more funds than when Khan paid for his own campaigns in the late 1990s. A helicopter flew the candidate to the day's first rally. Then he moved into the bus – actually a spartan portable building mounted on a truck.

At each stop Khan shouted his message: "Until now, no one has changed anything. The parties take turns but have not changed the system. I will transfer power to the common people."

The crowd waved cricket bats, some made of wood, others of cardboard. Many Pakistanis are illiterate so parties are designated by symbols. Khan won the Cricket World Cup for his country in 1992 and retired from the sport a national hero. A senior campaign aide of Nawaz Sharif, the PML president and current frontrunner in the coming polls, dismissed him last week as "a sportsman not a politician".

Khan told the Guardian that such attacks did not bother him. His style of politics, which consciously rejects patronage, tactical alliances and the support of powerful well-known figures with solid "votebanks", threatens the established parties, he said.

"Have you seen the energy? The passion? It's huge. There is so much hope," he said, over a rapid lunch of flatbread and curried mutton in the moving office.

Policies such as forcing the wealthy to pay tax – most currently do not – and making parliamentarians declare all their assets also worried his political opponents, he said, along with his own party's internal democracy.

Khan has also pledged to curb crippling power cuts within months and take money from the budget of Pakistan's powerful military to fund health, education and welfare programmes. Both, analysts say, are extremely ambitious objectives. Khan is convinced he can fulfil his promises.

Once known as a playboy, the 60-year-old has raised eyebrows in the west with a new faith and conservatism. In an autobiography he describes turning to religion, particularly the mystical sufi strand of Islam, after the death of his mother. "One lot call you a fundamentalist; the other a so-called secularist," he said.

Khan has led demonstrations over US drone strikes against Islamists in the west of the country and vehemently opposed Islamabad's decision to allow supplies for international forces in Afghanistan to cross Pakistani territory. Liberals accuse him of being too close to Pakistan's Islamists.

Khan said the roots of extremist groups waging an insurgency against the Pakistani state, "secular elements" and local opponents from bases in the restive tribal areas along the western border lay not in religion but the historic resistance of the Pashtun tribes there to "outsiders".

Such groups, however, are making systematic, and often successful, efforts to kill or maim other campaigning politicians from parties seen as insufficiently devout. "These parties [which are being targeted] were all perceived as pro-war. They all made pro-war statements," said Khan, whose mother was Pashtun.

Few doubt the wave of enthusiasm Khan has inspired. Rallies over the past 18 months have been among the biggest for many years, and in Lahore he has won over everyone from wealthy young professionals to a 24-year-old tea seller in a rough central neighbourhood.

Though Khan speaks of a "tsunami", analysts wonder if popular sentiment can be turned into votes without the experienced, well-funded machines of the major parties – and their sometimes ruthless tactics. "That's been the question for a year or more. No one knows the answer," said Cyril Almeida, a political journalist.

PTI party workers are, privately, unsure. Some talk of winning either "30 or 130" out of a total of 272 directly elected seats. Khan himself says a clear majority is "conceivable" but admits nothing is certain. "As a sportsmen I know the game isn't over until the last ball is bowled," he said.

Imran Khan reaches out to young voters with 'third-way' in Pakistan's general election