Nawaz Sharif

Biography

Nawaz Sharif was born in Lahore in 1949 into the family that owns the Ittefaq steel group. He studied at Government College in Lahore and took a law degree at the University of the Punjab. The nationalisation of his family's steel works under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto drew him into politics, and under General Zia-ul-Haq he became Punjab's finance minister in 1980 and its chief minister in 1985.

After Zia's death he led the army-backed Islami Jamhuri Ittehad alliance against Benazir Bhutto and became prime minister in November 1990, pursuing privatisation and deregulation. President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed him in April 1993; the Supreme Court restored him, but he resigned in July under military pressure and spent the next three years as leader of the opposition.

He won a large majority in 1997, curbed the president's power to dismiss governments, ordered Pakistan's first nuclear tests in May 1998 and signed the Lahore Declaration with India's Atal Bihari Vajpayee in February 1999. After the Kargil conflict he tried to remove the army chief, Pervez Musharraf, and was overthrown in the coup of 12 October 1999, convicted by a military court and sent into exile in Saudi Arabia.

He returned in 2007, led the PML-N in opposition and won the 2013 election to become prime minister for a third time. In July 2017 the Supreme Court disqualified him over his family's offshore assets revealed in the Panama Papers, and he was later sentenced in corruption cases, convictions that were overturned or set aside after he returned from London. He won a National Assembly seat in the disputed 2024 election, after which his brother Shehbaz became prime minister.