NO reform agenda is likely to emerge while the country runs under a so-called hybrid regime. Almost by its definition, such a set-up rests ultimately on a series of compromises made by its constituent parties to reconcile themselves to a simple fact: the country is being run by the bureaucrats with the establishment playing a significant role in ruling it. The political parties have been reduced to little more than a pantomime, to run the ceremonies of power.

With all their defects and problems, the parties are still the only carrier of the people`s aspirations, and today they are in more disarray than they have ever been in the past quarter century.

Under these circumstances, the state will only tighten its grip on everything it can get its hands on the citizenry and the e conomy and is not likely to find the will or the inclination to make any changes.

Consider their predicament one by one. Start with the ruling party, the PML-N. This party has the single longestrunningstreak ofreturningto power after every sort of defeat that Pakistani politics can possibly serve up. Their first government was dismissed by a president, and they dragged him down with them. Their second was overthrown by a general in a coup, who then swore on national TV that he would never allow it to return to power. But the general, later convicted, died in exile while the Noon league ruled in Pakistan. They were torn down by a Supreme Court judgement, their leaders thrown in jail and hounded into exile by the first `hybrid` regime of 2018, only to return to power barely four years later.

This is a formidable legacy, and along the way the party transformed the nature of Pakistan`s economy, even if via a set of reforms that ultimately proved abortive. So what is the problem this time round? The problem is the Noon league itself. They built this legacy with a formula that is resource-intensive. It took economic growth and massive redistributive schemes through which they built their relationship with the trade and business elites of the country as well as the rank and file Punjab voter. But to operatethese schemes it took massive infusions of foreign exchange borrowed from every source they could get their hands on the foreign currency deposit scheme, private markets, bilateral deposits, CPEC lending that left the country sagging under the weight of an unbearable debt burden. That option is no longer open to them, and they are trying what they can to operate the same model in Punjab, with whatever fiscal envelope they have, thanks to the NFC award, but it can only run so long as their main rival for power, Imran Khan, remains in jail.

Then there`s the PPP, the one party that has taken the heaviest beating by the establishment yet remains a contender to this day. Each timePakistan made the transition from military rule to civilian democracy, it was under the PPP. This is the party that steered Pakistan out of the crisis that Ayub`s dictatorship brought. It also led the country out of Zia`s wars. But its biggest test was navigating the transition after Musharraf, and the assassination of Benazir. This was the moment that demanded they hold that hottest of all political potatoes in Pakistan`s political history the `war on terror`, which it was their duty to own and tell the country `this is our war`. At the same time, they had to deal with the fallout of the Great Financial Crisis that eviscerated the country`s economy, bringing its entire financial system closer to ruin than it had ever come before. And then there was the fallout of the Mumbai incident in 2008, which reverberated till 2020 when Hafiz Saeed was finally convicted in Pakistan. No minor menu of challenges this.

But the party did all this on the back of a strat-egy that was eventually to prove its own undoing: reconciliation. Benazir was criticised for choosing a negotiated path back to power, but the wisdom of doing so was eventually revealed when the assemblies she fought to bring into being after the elections of 2008 dismissed Musharraf with nothing more than a simple resolution passed by each provincial legislature. But by 2024, the party that once fought for, and whose leaders were willing to die for, democracy, was bargaining for a slice of power in a hybrid set-up. Today it has become a party that will not stand for anything.

Ironically the PTI is the most vigorous carrier of the people`s will at this time, evidenced by the strenuous efforts required to keep it at bay. This is ironic because it is also the party that volunteered to be the wrecking ball that brought down democracy in Pakistan in 2018. Now it struggles to survive in a hybrid wasteland inaugurated by that election, and the only thing keeping it alive is the will of the people. Its own leadership is quarrelling among themselves, its voter does not know who to trust, and its leader languishes in the same jail where he sought to throw his own opponents when he was himself in power.

None of the PTPs supporters can give you a coherent answer as to why they like Khan so much, but so many of them do say that keeping them away from power took all the strength the state could muster in the form of the 26th Amendment. For reasons nobody understands, them included, the PTI is now riding the tiger of popular aspirations, and learning that the job is not as much fun perhaps as it seems from the outside.

The parties are in disarray now because there is no viable political strategy in the arena for a resurrection of civilian democracy. In the 1970s, there was the Constitution. In 1988, there was the simple demand to hold elections. In 2008, there was the Charter of Democracy. Today, there is nothing. And while that is the case, the hybrid wasteland stretches out to the horizon. • The writer is a business and economy joumalist.