ISLAMABAD: The nominee of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N, Mamnoon Hussain, won the presidential election on Tuesday with ease, but with a blemish due to a boycott led by the largest opposition party that may rankle during his five-year term beginning in September.

Mr Hussain, a 73-year-old Karachi businessman, secured 432 votes of an existing 674-vote parliamentary electoral college against just 77 of opposition Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) candidate Wajihuddin Ahmed in polling held at parliament in Islamabad and in four provincial assemblies.

The Pakistan Peoples Party and four smaller parties boycotted the election for the country’s 12th president over a controversial Supreme Court order carried out by the Election Commission to advance the polling date by a week from August 6 to July 30 on a ruling party’s petition without hearing other parties.

The PPP withdrew its candidate, Senator Rabbani, from the contest while three of its allies in the previous PPP-led coalition government -- Awami National Party, Pakistan Muslim League-Q, Balochistan National Party-Awami -- as well as the usually anti-PPP Awami Muslim League of former information minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed joined the boycott, though PML-Q members in the Balochistan Assembly cast their votes because of the party’s alliance with the PML-N-backed provincial government there.

The vote came a day after strong PPP-led protests in the National Assembly and the Senate where both the Supreme Court and the Election Commission came under fire, with some members of the upper house demanding that Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and Chief Election Commissioner Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim resign for the alleged wrongs done in curtailing the campaign time on PML-N grounds that the original polling date of Aug 6 would have been be too close to Eidul Fitr and that many lawmakers at the time would be in Saudi Arabia for the non-obligatory Umra pilgrimage or confined to secluded ‘Aitkaf’ prayers.

Mr Ebrahim, a former Supreme Court judge, like the PTI candidate, seemed undeterred by the protesters’ demand for his resignation as he came to the Parliament House for a while to witness some of the most listless voting at a combined session of the National Assembly and the Senate where 314 of the total 426 existing votes of the two houses -- with 19 seats of the 342-seat lower house and one of the 104-seat upper house being vacant -- were cast.

While three votes of the two houses were declared invalid, the remaining 112 members did not turn up, apparently due to the boycott.

The result of the polling at the Parliament House, announced by Islamabad High Court Chief Justice Anwar Kasi as the presiding officer, gave Mamnoon Hussain 277 votes and Wajihuddin Ahmed 33.

Unlike the enthusiasm witnessed during previous presidential elections at the same venue of the National Assembly chamber, general visitors’ galleries were empty and most lawmakers, including those of the ruling party, left the house after casting their votes, though some hectic activity was seen when, after a long wait, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif came to the house to cast his vote just 10 minutes before the close of polling at 3pm.

But while the prime minister stayed in the house until the victory of his party’s candidate at the Parliament House voting was announced, PTI chairman Imran Khan, who too came quite late in the day, betrayed an apparent lack of sportsman’s spirit -- despite being a former cricket hero -- as he left the chamber with all his party members much earlier without hearing the bad news about his party’s candidate who too was not seen around.

Some desk-thumping cheers by the ruling coalition members rang out in the hall, in a scene that was a far cry from resounding ‘jeay Bhutto’ chants from packed visitors’ galleries and much more vociferous cheers by PPP lawmakers when Asif Ali Zardari was elected president on Sept 6, 2008, with 479 of the then 702-vote electoral college against 153 of the then PML-N candidate, former Supreme Court judge Salimuzzaman Siddiqi, and 44 of PML-Q’s Mushahid Hussain.

The chief justices of the four provinces, who acted as presiding officers at their respective provincial assemblies, announced the polling results there while a consolidated result was announced by the chief election commissioner later at a brief news conference at the Election Commission.

The presence in the house of the PML-N candidate, who is due to assume office on Sept 9, a day after Mr Zardari becomes the first elected president to completes his five-year term, encouraged speculation about the future relationship of the new president with opposition parties.

As Mr Hussain sat next to Mr Sharif when the prime minister stayed in the house, speculation was rife in the corridors of parliament about whether the opposition parties would at some stage close the chapter of the present controversy about the presidential election or chant hostile slogans whenever the next president addresses parliament as had happened with former presidents Pervez Musharraf, Farooq Leghari and Ghulam Ishaq Khan.

There were queues of voters when polling began at about 10.15am with two separate booths set up for National Assembly members and one for senators to mark their ballot before inserting them into a single ballot box.

But there was only sporadic voting later in the day with quite long gaps when the polling staff sat idle when no voters were in the house.