It does not take any particular gift of insight to recognise Pakistan has serious problems of governance. Rampant corruption, nepotism, and rent-seeking, terrorism and militancy, enduring economic inequality and deprivation, abysmal levels of healthcare and education, an unending power crisis, ubiquitous religious intolerance, the list goes on ad nauseum and ad infinitum. Yet, despite the gravity of the situation, the country’s political leadership has virtually nothing substantive to say about dealing with these issues. What passes for constructive public policy in Pakistan is often little more than the taking of credit for exogenous factors that slightly ameliorate the country’s economic outlook (such as lower oil prices) and the constant expectation that someone else, either China or Saudi Arabia or the United States, will solve our problems for us. The few bright sparks of creative thinking that sometimes come to the fore when grappling with the country’s myriad tribulations are usually swiftly overwhelmed and submerged beneath the roiling tide of mediocrity and mendacity that is Pakistan’s mainstream politics.

From Nandipur to Karachi, and from children being abused in Kasur to victims of rape setting themselves ablaze in Muzaffargarh, the injustice and ineptitude that has become a fact of life in Pakistan stares us all in the face. What response has the political leadership offered to all of this? If the campaigns leading up to last Sunday’s by-election in NA-122 are anything to go by, the biggest issues Pakistan needs to deal with at this juncture relate to the personal integrity and moral standing of the PTI and PML-N’s candidates. After spending obscene amounts of money that made a mockery of the ECP’s code of conduct for the elections, and after drafting in a range of political luminaries and ‘heavyweights’ to drum up support for their respective platforms, the PTI and the PML-N ultimately succeeded in failing to advance the debate on policy by even an inch. Rarely has so much been said and done for so little gain.

At one level, it is tempting to welcome the results of the by-elections in Lahore and Okara as being an important step on the way to strengthening Pakistan’s democratic institutions. Most would agree that the polls were reasonably free and fair, notwithstanding some rumblings of discontent from the PTI, and the close margins of victory (as well as the upsets in Okara and PP-147) bode well for the notion that, left to its own devices, electoral competition will lead parties and politicians to be more pro-active in courting the electorate through the provision of better ideas and policies. As many have rightly pointed out over the past week, it would be a mistake for either the PTI or the PML-N to take their victories as vindicating their ‘performance’ as governing and political entities; the losses both parties suffered in Okara, and the split mandate in NA-122/PP-147 should amply demonstrate the extent to which the average voter is dissatisfied by what is on offer by both parties.

The problem, however, runs deeper than that. The belief that voters alienated by the PML-N have shifted to the PTI in search of a more credible alternative, or that PML-N supporters remain unconvinced by the noises being made by the PTI, assumes that the two parties are offering radically different visions of society, and that voters are making choices based on distinctions of this kind. The reality is that there is actually very little to distinguish the two parties from each other and from the other parties that populate the political mainstream in Pakistan. Instead, as anecdotal evidence about the eye-watering sums of money spent in Okara and Lahore continues to trickle out, it seems clear that the dynamics of campaigning and voting revolved around that same patronage politics that shapes the electoral landscape across the country. Similarly, at a superficial level, the similarity of the parties in question can also be gauged from the tenor of their campaigns; when not engaging in unrestrained personal attacks on their rival candidates, functionaries from both parties simply continued to mouth the same old rhetoric about providing ‘development’, aiding the poor, and standing up to oppression.

That might be well and good except for the fact that statements of this kind are utterly inconsequential. After all, when was the last time a politician addressing a rally or making a public statement clearly and unequivocally said that he or she was motivated by a burning desire to heap misery on the poor? Or that they would like nothing better than to watch people suffer as they helped themselves to the state’s largesse? How frequently have political leaders stood up and insisted that no matter what happens, their ascent to power would guarantee nothing more than their own enrichment at the expense of everyone else, and that their incompetence and inefficiency would only be equaled by their venality and insouciance?

As such, when PTI leaders line up to denounce their counterparts in the PML-N by accusing them of corruption, the promises they make with regards to addressing these concerns are no different from what the PML-N says about itself and its opponents. When it comes to concrete questions of policy or, at a more general level, the ideological underpinnings of their respective approaches to understanding and changing society, both parties have very little to say. All that really emerges from their words and actions is an opportunistic hodgepodge of positions that blends an unquestioning embrace of capitalism (and its attendant contradictions) with old-fashioned conservatism regarding the religious and social order. In a world where, earlier this week, the ECP suspended 272 provincial and national legislators, drawn from across the political spectrum, for failing to declare their assets, and where provincial governments across the country have deliberately drafted legislation that actively seeks to undermine the autonomy and capacity of local governments that might be elected in opposition to them, it is difficult to point towards anything that truly leads any one party to stand out from the rest of the pack.

This does not mean that nothing good emerged out of last week’s by-elections. If nothing else, the results should go a long way towards ending the unnecessary and empty confrontation between the PTI the PML-N over alleged rigging in 2013. Similarly, the hollowness of the current democratic milieu should not be taken as an indictment of democracy more generally; it is a system that takes time to evolve, and authoritarian alternatives have hardly fared better. Instead, the by-elections should simply serve as timely reminder of the fact that Pakistan’s parties still have a long way to go, and that the ideologically barren landscape they inhabit is one that is hardly conducive to generating the kind of radical and progressive political discourse that will be required to solve the country’s problems. The results of the by-elections should be taken as an opportunity for more critique, not less; partisans who unquestioningly swallow the lines fed to them by their parties of choice would do well to reflect on just how limited and narrow the ambitions and plans of their leaders really are.