The Election Commission of Pakistan has summoned the interior secretary and the Islamabad chief commissioner for a formal hearing on October 21 over the capital’s long-delayed local government elections, announcing that it intends to issue an election schedule after hearing the officials. The schedule will be framed under the ICT Local Government Act, 2015, the ECP said, because the federal government’s January 2026 amendment ordinance has lapsed without replacement legislation being enacted. Islamabad has now been without an elected local government for more than five years.
The announcement, reported on Wednesday by the Express Tribune, Dawn and MinuteMirror, follows the publication of the final union council delimitation lists this week. The ECP has said the two top officials must explain the delay in holding the polls before the commission moves to fix a schedule.
What the ECP announced
According to the reports, the ECP issued notices to the interior secretary and the Islamabad chief commissioner, directing them to appear for a hearing on October 21. The commission wants the officials to account for the delay in holding the local polls. Once the hearing is concluded, the ECP intends to issue the election schedule under the 2015 Act, the law that last governed the capital’s local elections.
The hearing is the first formal move by the commission to break a deadlock that has kept Islamabad’s local elections in limbo for over five years. No outlet has published an explanation of the full delay timeline or what the October 21 hearing will actually decide, so here is the complete picture.
The legal vacuum explained
The core problem is a legal vacuum. The Islamabad Local Government (Amendment) Ordinance, 2026 expired on September 6 without the required legislation being enacted to replace it, and the Law Ministry returned the draft local government rules to the Interior Ministry for lack of legal authority, the Express Tribune and Dawn reported.
This matters because the current delimitation exercise was initiated on July 21 under the Federal Capital Islamabad (Amendment) Ordinance, 2026, according to Dawn. With that ordinance now dead, the final union council lists published this week sit without a live legal framework, which is why the ECP plans to fall back on the 2015 Act to hold the polls.
The federal government’s attention has meanwhile been elsewhere, including the emergency proclamation of October 11 that put Khyber Pakhtunkhwa under governor’s rule, a move parliament endorsed in a joint sitting this week.
A five-year timeline of delays
Islamabad’s first and only local government elections were held in 2015-16, when the PML-N won and Sheikh Anser Aziz became the capital’s first mayor under a 50-union-council system. That government’s term expired in February 2021, and the constitutional 120-day rule for holding fresh elections was missed.
Since then, the capital’s local polls have been postponed repeatedly. The number of union councils became a running dispute, rising from 50 to 101 and then to 125. In December 2025 the ECP set February 15, 2026 as the new polling date, but the January 2026 ordinance introduced a new model of three town corporations, each with a mayor and two deputy mayors, and triggered the fourth postponement.
The ordinance then lapsed on September 6, the replacement law never arrived, and the capital passed the five-year mark without an elected local government, leaving the entire municipal apparatus to unelected administration.
What happens on October 21
The hearing will put the interior secretary and the chief commissioner on record about why the polls were not held and what stands in their way now. The ECP intends to issue the election schedule after the hearing, but it has announced no election date yet.
The unresolved question is which legal model will govern the polls: the 2015 Act, under which the commission says it will frame the schedule, or a revived version of the three-town-corporation framework the lapsed ordinance had introduced. Neither the ECP nor the government has said anything publicly on that point, so it will be the key thing to watch when the hearing concludes.
Islamabad’s wait is at least shorter than one other Pakistani capital: Gilgit-Baltistan passed its amended Local Government Act after a 22-year wait this week, clearing the way for its first local polls in over two decades. Read more of PakMirror’s national news coverage.
