HIS pudgy, mustachioed face is all over Karachi. Altaf Hussain lives in London, having fled his hometown two decades ago after an attempt on his life. But the fanatical followers in the party he heads, the Muttahida Qaumi Mahaz (MQM), or United National Movement, plastered buildings, flyovers and buses with his image ahead of the provincial and national elections held on May 11th. As usual in a city Mr Hussain runs by remote control, the MQM romped home. Of 19 parliamentary seats, it won 18. But it suffered two serious setbacks. And that is ominous news for a city with an appalling history of politically linked violence, where bloodshed is worsening again. Last year was the deadliest for two decades, with some 2,000 deaths.

The first setback for the MQM is that, nationally, the Pakistan Muslim League (N), of Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister-elect, won a big mandate. Mr Sharif will be able to form a government with a convincing majority in the National Assembly. The MQM has been used to being the third large national party in Pakistan, and an important partner in coalition governments. Not this time. The loss of leverage at the centre may make it even more intolerant of challenges in its Karachi fief.

The MQM was formed to represent the Mohajirs, Urdu-speaking migrants who came to Karachi after partition from India in 1947, when it was the capital of the new Muslim country. Karachi is no longer capital, but has expanded to a population of perhaps 20m today. The MQM has withstood challenges from parties supported by other ethnic groups: Sindhis (Karachi is part of Sindh province), Punjabis and, especially in recent years, Pushtuns fleeing instability near the Afghan border. The MQM has a cadre of competent technocrats and has run a relatively efficient local administration. But it has also remained on top in the violent world of intimidation and murder that scar the city’s politics.

The second setback for the MQM is that the party that supplanted it as the third-biggest nationally also threatens its dominance of Karachi, even among Mohajir voters—and it seems unlikely simply to go away. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), or Movement for Justice, is led by Imran Khan, a former cricket star. He has become a political hero to the country’s educated young, and even their parents, as well as to others fed up with the feudal, corrupt and violent world of Pakistan’s usual politics. In Karachi, the PTI was runner-up to the MQM in most constituencies. And it now has a National Assembly seat there. It won this after re-voting on May 19th in 43 of one constituency’s 200-odd polling stations, called because of alleged vote-rigging.

That victory was marred by death. The night before the re-vote, a senior PTI politician in Karachi, Zohra Shahid Hussain, was murdered. Men on a motorcycle attacked her and shot her through the head. The police speculated that it was a chance mugging, but her colleagues say the killing resembled a gangland hit. Mr Khan blamed Mr Hussain, the MQM’s exiled chieftain, as “directly responsible” for the murder. The MQM denied this and is to sue Mr Khan for defamation. Mr Khan said he also pins the murder on the British government, which has long tolerated Mr Hussain’s running a party steeped in violence from an address in London’s suburbia. The London police are now investigating Mr Hussain, a British citizen, after receiving complaints about a speech he broadcast to his followers in Karachi on May 12th, which the PTI took as inciting violence against its workers. He was misinterpreted, says the MQM.

Speaking on the day of the fresh voting, Arif Alvi, the successful PTI candidate in the well-off constituency of Karachi at stake, said that the previous night the district was kept awake by gunfire into the air. He likened this to MQM tactics before the strikes it sometimes calls—violence designed to intimidate people into observing the party’s orders. The MQM boycotted the rerun, wanting fresh voting in all of the constituency’s polling stations. Despite a large presence of police, soldiers and paramilitary rangers, turnout was low in a relatively poor part of the constituency, Hijrat Colony. In this area of lean-to shacks and cramped breeze-block houses, accessible down a dirt track crowded with donkey carts and tuk-tuks, residents said men on motorcycles had toured the previous night, telling people not to vote in the morning.

The good burgers of Karachi

Turnout was higher in the posh school that served as a polling station in a well-heeled part of town. Here were members of the “burger class”, the well-educated elite that has hitherto tended to shun politics, and is now, nationwide, a leading force in what Mr Khan calls the “tsunami” the PTI has started. Some well-dressed middle-aged residents were voting for the first time. They used to think their votes would be wasted. (Besides, voting is one of the few tiresome chores that is hard to delegate to a servant.) Others used to vote for the MQM.

Karachi’s endemic political violence is one of the most intractable of the myriad problems facing Mr Sharif’s new government. Making up perhaps 20% of the country’s GDP, the city is hard for even a Punjabi-based government to ignore. Besides its gangster-style politics, it is also home to extremists from the Pakistani Taliban and other terrorist groups.

The MQM is both the best-organised of the parties and the one best able to bully and intimidate its rivals. “It is a fascist party,” says Mr Alvi. And it is wounded. During wave after wave of migration into Karachi, it has defended the Mohajirs, some of whom see themselves, having quit India for Pakistan, as Pakistan’s truest citizens, and some of whom, to the MQM’s evident dismay, just voted for the PTI. Some Mohajirs feel that, unlike Pushtuns, Sindhis and Punjabis, they have nowhere else to go. In the words of an MQM activist quoted in “Pakistan: A Hard Country”, a 2011 book by Anatol Lieven, a British scholar: “We have our backs to the sea.” And their party will not yield an inch.

Economist.com/blogs/banyan