Posters loom large in dour Pakistani poll campaign

By Kamran Haider

LAHORE (Reuters) - Security fears may have kept Pakistani politicians off the streets, but their faces can be seen every way one turns in the city of Lahore.

With days to go before the Feb. 18 poll for new national and provincial assemblies there doesn't appear to be any room left for more posters in a city regarded as the nerve centre of Pakistani politics.

They peer down from giant posters plastered on buildings and billboards and from banners hanging on lamp posts in the capital of Punjab, the province where half of Pakistan's 160 million people live and from where half of the parliament will be elected.

Yet printers in the narrow streets of small workshops say business is way down compared with past campaigns, even as their presses pump out a blizzard of posters as parties make a final push to sway a public that opinion polls show is tired of President Pervez Musharraf and the politicians who surround him.

"Every printer has been waiting for five years but this is the worst election we've had," Abdul Aziz said above the clatter of a printing press as he sat in his shop, its floor strewn with strips of waste paper.

Competition for votes is fierce but campaigning has been subdued and sombre since opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on Dec. 27.

Aziz said election business dried up when Bhutto was killed and for a while it seemed the elections might be called off.