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Pakistan began the year with the military establishment having tightened its grip on political institutions, but as the year progressed, opposition parties sought to reassert themselves and challenged both the PTI government and military leaders. Political movements took center stage as religious extremists as well as regionalist movements drew strength from the challenges to the PTI government. Feminists demanded action after a series of sexual assaults, and religious minorities continued to be targeted by violence. The COVID pandemic upended the economy, which was already straining under low growth and high debt and deficit conditions. Foreign relations provided many challenges as the government sought to target India for its mistreatment of Kashmiris, while the Pakistan–China relationship remained strong.

This article examines the recent shifts in the ideological messaging of Karachi's Muttahida Qaumi Movement. Faced with external challenges, the MQM has adapted by using the rhetoric of the "global war on terror" to gain advantage over its political opponents.

In recent years much has been written on the communist successor parties. Although much of the existent work focuses on the electoral performance of these parties or has described, in great detail, the development of single parties, this paper evaluates the utility of theories of party identity change in application to the successor parties. As an initial exploration we investigate the successor parties' programs before and after the initial competitive parliamentary elections in Hungary (in 1990), Poland (in 1991) and Russia (in 1993) to determine the extent to which poor electoral performance in initial competitive elections compelled the successor parties to alter their political identities.