Every populist surge begins with a whisper: this time will be different. For Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and its leader, Imran Khan, that whisper became a roar.
For years, PTI rallies felt less like political events and more like collective therapy sessions, where young professionals, students, and urban voters vented frustration at dynastic politics, corruption, and institutions that seemed permanently rigged against them. Khan gave voice to that anger in a way few leaders ever do, transforming resentment into hope, hope into loyalty, and loyalty into political power. Yet while PTI’s rise mirrored global populist waves, from Juan Perón in Argentina to Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Narendra Modi, the movement’s structural weaknesses would soon reveal the limits of charisma in Pakistan’s unique political system.
Populism is not judged by how loudly it rises. It is judged by what it becomes once it wins.
Take Peronism, the gold standard of enduring populism. Juan Perón didn’t just inspire Argentina’s working class; he reorganised the state around them. Unions were not an accessory to his movement; they were its spine. Welfare was not charity; it was identity. Peronism embedded itself into everyday life so deeply that even Perón’s enemies had to govern in its shadow. Eight decades later, it still defines Argentine politics.
PTI never became that.
Imran Khan inspired fierce loyalty, but loyalty without structure is fragile. PTI’s base was emotionally intense but socially scattered: students, professionals, overseas Pakistanis, and first-time voters. They were united by frustration more than by shared economic interests. When PTI entered government, it faced an economy already on life support, IMF conditionalities, and a bureaucracy that had no reason to internalise its vision. The slogans remained powerful. The machinery did not.
Comparisons with Trumpism are revealing. Trump, like Khan, was a celebrity outsider who treated institutions as enemies once they resisted him. His supporters, like PTI’s, interpreted every indictment as proof of conspiracy. But Trumpism survived defeat because it captured an existing structure, the Republican Party. That party’s donors, judges, media ecosystem, and local organisations gave Trumpism a body even when its head was wounded. PTI had no such inheritance. It had to build a party and a governing system simultaneously, and fell short at both.
Erdoğan’s trajectory offers a darker lesson. He began as a populist reformer challenging Turkey’s secular elite. Once in power, he moved systematically: capturing courts, reshaping the military, subordinating media, and rewarding loyalists. Populism hardened into authoritarian rule. Erdoğan understood something Imran Khan never fully grasped: institutions do not fall to speeches, they fall to patient capture.
PTI could generate outrage, but outrage does not institutionalise itself
Modi’s rise in India followed yet another path. His charisma mattered, but it rested on decades of ideological groundwork by the RSS and a disciplined cadre-based party. There was a worldview, a memory, and an organisation ready to convert emotion into permanence. PTI had none of that. Its ideology was moral, not structural; reactive, not programmatic.
Still, it would be too easy and too lazy to blame PTI alone.
Pakistan is structurally hostile to Perón-style populism. The most obvious obstacle is wearing a uniform. In Argentina, Perón emerged from within the state and bent it toward labour. In Pakistan, the state already has a centre of gravity, and it is not civilian. Any populist leader must either align with that reality or collide with it. Imran Khan did both, benefiting from establishment support early on, then challenging it once power slipped away. The outcome was almost predetermined.
The economy presents another hard limit. Peronism was built on factories, unions, and workers who could be organised, mobilised, and rewarded. Pakistan’s economy is informal, fragmented, and weakly unionised. You cannot build durable populism without organised groups that feel material gain, not just moral satisfaction. PTI could generate outrage, but outrage does not institutionalise itself.
Electoral reality compounds the problem. Pakistan’s politics still runs on patronage, biradari, and local power brokers. PTI came to power by recruiting the same “electables” it once condemned. That compromise was not just tactical, it was corrosive. Perón replaced clientelism with mass identity. PTI had to coexist with clientelism, and it hollowed out its anti-elite promise from within.
And finally, there is the question PTI has yet to answer: what exists beyond Imran Khan?
Peronism survived Perón. Trumpism lives beyond Trump. Erdoğanism and Modiism are now systems, not personalities. PTI remains tethered to one man, his charisma, his grievances, his narrative of betrayal. That makes it powerful in the streets but brittle in history.
Yet political stories rarely end where analysis would like them to. Imran Khan is alive, politically potent, and, ironically, more symbol than administrator in confinement. Jail has removed him from the compromises of governance while preserving his moral narrative.
For many supporters, the image has frozen at a moment of defiance, not failure.
This does not erase the structural limits PTI faces. But it opens a narrow alternative path. If PTI can learn to function beyond constant personalisation, convert grievance into material politics, and develop the patience to engage institutions over time rather than trying to overwhelm them in a single electoral moment, it could yet return in altered form. Such a transformation would be quieter, less theatrical, and far less certain, but potentially more durable.
PTI no longer needs to prove that it can shake Pakistan’s political order. It already has. The unresolved question is whether it can outgrow its moment and become something steadier than protest and more serious than spectacle.
Pakistan tried populism, and the system survived. Whether populism, reshaped and chastened, can eventually learn to survive Pakistan remains an open, and unfinished, question.