ISLAMABAD: Although his political clout has been much diminished by his party’s electoral defeat a month ago, President Asif Ali Zardari will yet make another history with what seems to be his swansong to parliament on Monday.

It will be his record sixth address to a joint sitting of the National Assembly and Senate to open a new parliamentary year, as mandated by the constitution, though the fifth one last year too was a record because no other president had addressed so many joint sittings before him. And it will be his last such address as he runs out his five-year presidential term in September.

In his last speech to a joint sitting on March 17, 2012, Mr Zardari had talked proudly about four years’ achievements of the coalition government of then-prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, led by his PPP, and about what must be done in the last and fifth year of that government’s term, disregarding some protest shouting and a walkout by then-opposition PML-N and JUI-F. He might do somewhat similar this time as well though he was not expected so say much about the plans of the new PML-N government, whose prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, took over only on Wednesday and formed a cabinet on Friday.

However, a political source close to the presidency told Dawn that while the speech would be authored by the president himself, its text would be shown to people concerned in the new government before its delivery in the joint sitting, which is due to begin at the Parliament House at 4.30pm.

But whatever its contents, the president’s address would hardly carry the force of his joint sitting speeches in the past when his word weighed over everybody else in the government and he also held the key office of PPP co-chairman, despite the transfer of most of presidential executive powers to parliament, or prime minister, through the landmark Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution that he had helped to come about.

He gave up the party office this year after court challenges and the PPP too has been reduced to a distant second position in the National Assembly, from first in the previous house, after its rout in the May 11 elections in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan —though retaining its hold in Sindh.

And contrary to last year’s protests, mainly over power cuts and law and order, the sitting this time is expected to be a much calmer affair.

The PML-N and its allied parties, some of which had also been PPP allies in the previous government, would be expected to ensure a smooth sitting, which has been convened at the new prime minister’s own advice.

While the PPP is now the main opposition party in both houses, the PTI, thrown up as the second largest opposition party in the National Assembly in the May 11 vote, is unlikely to cause any problem, though its chairman Imran Khan, who is yet to come the new lower house because he is still convalescing from some serious injuries suffered during a campaign accident, had vowed before the elections that if he were elected prime minister he would not take oath of office from President Zardari and would find some alternative route.

PTI vice-chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who had been foreign minister in the PPP government before resigning in February 2011, said his party’s lawmakers would listen to the president’s “point of view in accordance with parliamentary etiquette” and comment on it afterwards.

The PML-N chief, whose party was the main rival to the PPP, expressed no such reservations and took oath from Mr Zardari at an unusually cordial ceremony on Wednesday after praising, in his first speech to the new National Assembly, a smooth transition from one elected government to another.

It was some abhorrence of former military ruler Pervez Musharraf for the National Assembly that gave Mr Zardari an extra sixth chance, instead of five, to address a joint sitting. Gen Musharraf, now detained at his farmhouse in Islamabad facing criminal charges, including responsibility in the Dec 27, 2007, assassination of PPP leader Benazir Bhutto and detention of superior court judges after he declared a controversial emergency in November 2007, addressed a joint sitting as president only once in 2004, in the face of strong opposition protests, and never came to parliament again.

He did not call a joint sitting even after the February 2008 elections and that constitutional requirement was fulfilled by President Zardari.