Pakistan People's Party in the context of Second Murad Ali Shah ministry

The prime minister of Azad Kashmir (Urdu: وزِیرِ اعظم آزاد کشمیر, romanized: Wazīr ē Aʿẓam lit. 'Grand Vizier', Urdu pronunciation: [ʋəˈziːr-ˌeː ˈɑː.zəm]) is the chief executive of Azad Jammu and Kashmir region of Pakistan. The title of Prime Minister symbolizes the nominal independence of Azad Kashmir. The prime minister heads the Council of Ministers, who are appointed from amongst the members of the Azad Kashmir Legislative Assembly. The premier too is elected by the AJK Legislative Assembly which is directly elected by the people.

The current prime minister is Faisal Mumtaz Rathore, a member of the Pakistan People's Party who took office on 17 November 2025 following the ousting of Chaudhry Anwarul-Haq through a motion of no-confidence.

Raja Faisal Mumtaz Rathore (born 11 April 1978) is an Azad Kashmiri politician serving as the 16th Prime Minister of Azad Kashmir since 17 November 2025. He is a senior member of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and has previously held several ministerial positions in the AJK government.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto NPk (5 January 1928 – 4 April 1979) was a Pakistani barrister, politician and statesman who served as the fourth president of Pakistan from 1971 to 1973 and later as the ninth prime minister of Pakistan from 1973 until his overthrow in 1977. He was also the founder and first chairman of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) from 1967 until his execution in 1979.

Born in Sindh and educated at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Oxford, Bhutto trained as a barrister at Lincoln's Inn before entering politics. He was a cabinet member during president Iskandar Mirza's tenure, holding various ministries during president Ayub Khan's military rule from 1958. Bhutto became the foreign minister in 1963, advocating for Operation Gibraltar in Kashmir, leading to the 1965 war with India. Following the Tashkent Declaration, he was dismissed from the government. Bhutto established the PPP in 1967, focusing on a left-wing and socialist agenda, and contested the 1970 general election, arising as the largest political party in Western Pakistan with a landslide victory in Punjab and Sindh; and a coalition victory with National Awami Party in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier. The Awami League, victorious with a landslide in East Pakistan, and the PPP were unable to agree on power transfer, leading to civil unrest in the east — further intensified by military action under Yahya Khan's military government — followed by a civil war and a war with India, resulting in the creation of Bangladesh. After Pakistan's loss in the east, Yahya resigned amidst a military revolt against him and Bhutto assumed the presidency in December 1971, imposing emergency rule and securing a ceasefire on the western front.

Benazir Bhutto (21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007) was a Pakistani politician and stateswoman who served as the 11th prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990, and again from 1993 to 1996. She was the first woman elected to head a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country. Ideologically a liberal and a secularist, she chaired or co-chaired the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) from the early 1980s until her assassination in 2007.

Of Sindhi, Persian and Kurdish parentage, Bhutto was born in Karachi to the politically-significant aristocratic Bhutto family. She studied at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, where she served as President of the Oxford Union. She returned to Pakistan in 1977 during her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's socialist government, shortly before her father was ousted in a military coup and later executed. Bhutto and her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, took control of the PPP and led the country's Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD). Bhutto was repeatedly imprisoned by Zia-ul-Haq's military government and self-exiled to Great Britain in 1984. She returned in 1986 and — influenced by Thatcherite economics — transformed the PPP's platform from a socialist to a liberal one, before leading it to victory in the 1988 election. As prime minister, her attempts at reform were stifled by conservative and Islamist forces within the country, including President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and the Pakistani military. Her administration, having been accused of corruption and nepotism, was dismissed by Khan in 1990 with the following election being rigged by Intelligence services to ensure a victory for the conservative Islamic Democratic Alliance (IJI), at which point Bhutto became the Leader of the Opposition.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is a political party in Pakistan established in 1996 by cricketer and politician Imran Khan, who served as the country's prime minister from 2018 to 2022. The party is led by Gohar Ali Khan since late 2023. The PTI ranks among the three major Pakistani political parties alongside the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML–N) and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP).

Despite Khan's popular persona in Pakistan, the PTI had limited initial success: it failed to win, as a collective, a single seat in the 1997 general election and the 2002 general election; only Khan himself was able to win a seat. From 1999 to 2007, the PTI supported the presidency of General Pervez Musharraf. It later rose in opposition to Musharraf in 2007 and also boycotted the 2008 general election, accusing it of having been conducted with fraudulent procedures under Musharraf's rule. The global popularity of the "Third Way" during the Musharraf era led to the rise of a new Pakistani political bloc focused on centrism, deviating from the traditional dominance of the centre-left PPP and the centre-right PML–N. When the PML–Q began to decline in the aftermath of Musharraf's presidency, much of its centrist voter bank was lost to the PTI. Around the same time, the PPP's popularity began to decrease after the disqualification of Yusuf Raza Gillani in 2012. With a claimed membership of over 10 million in Pakistan in 2012, the PTI appealed to many former PPP voters, particularly in the provinces of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, due to its outlook on populism.