KARACHI, Pakistan — Karachi’s residents will go to the polls angry this week.

The city, Pakistan’s economic powerhouse, is in shambles, roads crumbling, slums expanding, deprived of basic government services although it provides the country with about 40 percent of its revenue. And its political landscape has been profoundly jumbled.

Across the country, Pakistani voters will be making choices on Wednesday that have been heavily winnowed by the military establishment, which through intimidation and a sympathetic judiciary has repressed its unfavored candidates — and even entire political movements — in recent months.

Nowhere have the results of the military’s manipulation of politics been more evident than in Karachi, both for worse and for better.

For the first time in three decades, Karachi residents will vote without much of the threat of street violence and poll manipulation that kept the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or M.Q.M., as the city’s dominant force for so long.