Ayear on since the fateful protests at military installations, Pakistan’s political landscape remains stifled and straitjacketed. The most popular party sits in opposition, the most popular politician remains in jail. A minority government occupies office, held in place by the coercive protection of the establishment.

This configuration is likely to continue till it serves the interests of the most powerful actor in the polity. It will fall apart once those interests are served through some other end, perhaps even by a reconciliation with the PTI. Given Pakistan’s political history of factional intrigue and about-turns, this outcome is entirely within the realm of possibility. Would such a return for the PTI solve several key issues currently afflicting the polity?

The current hybrid configuration of governance is remarkable for everything it does not possess: Legitimacy through popular support, a coherent plan for sustained material prosperity, and most of all, the absence of an ideological or ideational vision for what the Pakistani state and society should look like. In its stead, we get a hybrid ruling arrangement, pipe-dreams of Saudi economic patronage, and an amorphous rejection of Imran Khan’s populism.

Of the three gaps identified above, a return to power of the PTI, i.e. the party that won the highest number of votes and seats, solves the legitimacy crisis immediately. If one believes that a government with legitimacy is better than one without – both as means and an end to itself – then a route that allows the PTI to come back to power solves this particular issue.

The second issue, i.e. the absence of a coherent plan for sustained prosperity, is a bit trickier to solve. All mainstream parties bank on ill-advised consumption-led booms predicated on public debt, imports, and exchange rate manipulation to sustain their politics. Arguably this is a function of the short-time horizons imposed both by the electoral cycle and the perennial pressure of unelected institutions. Meeting the military’s resource appetite, foreign policy agendas, and its imposed benchmarks of performance are sources of acute pressure on elected governments, frequently producing sub-optimal decisions.

The PTI’s brief time in office at the center and in Punjab showed a reproduction of some of the same patterns. Its partial focus on export performance and improving welfare efficiency were useful, but these were drowned out by the same rent-allocating, piecemeal logic seen across various regimes of the past four decades. Placating its allies and constituents in the propertied classes remained its foremost priority, with stand-out examples being the real estate amnesty scheme, subsidized credit for large conglomerates, and land grabs in Lahore’s urban periphery. Given the lack of agenda diversity on economic policymaking, this is one problem that is unlikely to be solved in the short-run, even if a legitimate government comes into power.

Finally, the third issue – ideational vision for state and society – is worth parsing through in a bit more detail. The PTI’s politics in recent years have been based on presenting a moral vision of the world that unites large swathes of the citizenry under an anti-corruption and religio-nationalist agenda. Khan’s invocations of politics as a fight between good and evil, and the use of religious imagery to connect with the voters has proven to be quite successful. Centrally, it has birthed an information ecosystem that is both decentralized and carries unprecedented reach.

Ordinary Pakistanis from the middle and lower middle classes actively participate in this ecosystem, adding their own contributions through Facebook posts, Tik-Tok videos, and WhatsApp messages. This decentralized ecosystem serves as the single biggest outlet for public anger at economic stagnation, state repression, and political manipulation. It also explains how despite the cancellation of a unified ballot symbol, a plurality of PTI candidates romped to victory across the country. Many more such victories were denied by post-poll machinations.

The PTI’s moral language that divides society between a corrupt cabal, and its supporters in state and non-state institutions (such as the media and civil society), and honest Pakistanis has proven to be immensely useful at shaping the political landscape. It has delivered a core set of supporters in the urban middle classes to the party, and allowed other groups angry with the status quo to join in through their votes.

But the catch is that this particular vision of politics does not immediately translate into a clear-cut vision for what state and society should look like. There is no constitutional design unique to its anti-corruption platform. It carries no shape of what the state should look like, beyond the strange proposal to have direct elections for the Prime Minister. This is reflective of a politics that singularly holds Imran Khan as the personalized repository of popular aspiration.

To draw this vagueness out, one can contrast it with ethno-nationalist or socialist politics, both of which propose different models of what the state should look like. Ethnic parties from smaller regions advocate for parliamentary federalism, with an empowered and representative upper house and devolved powers for the provinces. Socialist parties in other parts of the world advocate for a unitary state that controls and coordinates economic and political activity, often through presidential forms of rule.

If there is no easy shape for the state to emerge from the corrupt vs non-corrupt binary, there is also nothing grounding it to society as it actually exists. Social inequality, in its current form in Pakistan, is between genders, classes, religious communities, and ethnic groups. Populism that puts everyone but a few political opponents in the same camp as ‘ordinary citizens’ glosses over these real inequities. This may not necessarily be a problem when everyone is angry at the status quo, but is a problem when governing decisions and trade-offs have to be made. Without a clear identification of whose problem deserves attention, it is likely the dominant groups will stand to benefit.

In the current, repressive climate, PTI is operating on a survival logic. Its decision-making is based on shoring up the party internally and putting up a unified front. It has done remarkably well to thrive electorally despite a significant onslaught. Yet its own long-term viability rests on thinking through key questions that address the ideational gap plaguing Pakistani politics: what problem is it solving for Pakistan? Beyond corruption and a catch-all idea of the citizenry, what is its understanding of social inequality? What would be its solution? And what form of the state and the constitution would correspond to its solution?