LAHORE/ISLAMABAD - Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif will be the next president of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).

The Election Commission of Pakistan has, in terms of Political Parties Act of 2002, served notice on Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz to appoint a new (acting) party head following the disqualification verdict against former prime minister Nawaz Sharif by the Supreme Court.

PML-N Chairman Raja Zafarul Haq told media yesterday that Shehbaz Sharif will be the next president of the party about which a formal announcement will be made soon. Raja Zafarul Haq said decision to appoint Shehbaz Sharif as the president of the party is a majority decision. He supported Shehbaz for party’s presidentship recalling that he was given PML-N’s top office in the centre following disqualification of Nawaz Sharif in plane hijacking case in the year 2000.

Nawaz took over as PML-N president in 1988. During the period of his family’s ‘exile,’ December 2000 to November 2007, senior leader of the party Javed Hashmi served as acting president of the party under his instructions.

In case Nawaz Sharif is replaced as PML-N head, then another requirement of law about deleting the suffix Nawaz (N) which append the PML will have to be met. Interestingly, PML at present is already registered with the Election Commission. The PML-Q, before election 2013, had claimed itself the only genuine Muslim League. Therefore, possibility cannot be ruled out that this party will need to adopt the similar mode which the PPP did before the election 2002 when the party had to be renamed PPP (Parliamentarians) then under Amin Faheem as president since the party chairperson Benazir Bhutto was made political outcast and was abroad.

Shehbaz Sharif was previously named as a contestant for NA-120 Lahore seat which was vacated by disqualification of Nawaz Sharif. But his name was dropped later. Now he will be the central president of the PML-N while holding the provincial chief ministership.

Earlier, Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) removed the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as President of PML-Nawaz and asked the party to appoint its new head.

The move comes following disqualification of former the prime minister as Member of National Assembly (MNA) by the apex court on July 28.

The five-member Supreme Court bench also directed the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to file corruption reference against the former prime minister within six weeks which will be taken up by the trial court soon.

In its notice to the PML-N, the ECP while citing Political Parties Order 2002 said that a disqualified lawmaker cannot hold any office in a political party.

The ECP further stated that Article 15 of the PML-N’s own party constitution stipulates that if the seat of party president is vacant, it is to be filled within one week’s time.

The ECP notification also cited the Supreme Court ruling in the Panama Papers case, in which Nawaz Sharif was formally asked to quit as prime minister.

Nawaz Sharif had resigned from the post of the prime minister last month when the Supreme Court disqualified him over his failure to disclose his ‘un-withdrawn receivables, constituting assets’ in his nomination papers filed ahead of the 2013 general elections.

The court had also ordered NAB to file the references within six weeks before the accountability court of Rawalpindi-Islamabad on the basis of the material collected and referred to by the Joint Investigating Team (JIT) that probed into Sharif’s offshore assets as revealed in April last year in the Panama Papers.

The ECP asked the PML-N to elect a new party leader and then inform it. The development rocked the PML-N leadership which immediately convened a meeting of senior party members, including Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and former interior minister Chaudhry Nisar.

The notice comes a day before Nawaz Sharif is set to travel from Islamabad to his hometown Lahore in what is set to be a ‘historic’ rally undertaken by the PML-N and ousted prime minister to garner much-needed political mileage in the face of the challenges its government is facing.

On last Monday Nawaz Sharif during an interaction with television anchors said that the procession was not “a protest” but “a journey back home” that he was undertaking because “risks need to be taken for the country”.

On the other hand, Nawaz Sharif’s political rival, Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf Chairman Imran Khan on last Monday had urged the PML-N to distance itself from the ousted prime minister warning that it would “ruin itself” if it did not do so.

Imran Khan had also alleged that Sharif’s plan to travel to Lahore with a cavalcade on GT Road was a “deliberate attempt to undermine the Supreme Court” by calling into question its verdict in the Panama Papers case.