Do we like them?

Do we like Asif Ali Zardari?

Our score: 5 out of 10. Thin and complicated: a mixed good-person record and one contested remark on the harm side, with little reporting we could open to settle it.

Zardari is Pakistan's president, back in the job since March 2024 after a first term from 2008 to 2013. He became the PPP's driving force after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in 2007. Sorry, mate, that's the textbook version; the interesting bit is how he got through the courts.

For about two decades he faced a string of graft references, and he spent years in jail. A Rawalpindi accountability court acquitted him in the last one still pending against him, and he has been acquitted in all of the references we found. Dawn reported that the final acquittal followed an apparently weak prosecution, so how clean that makes him depends on whether you read it as vindication or as politics.

On the harm check, nothing turned up from him on trans or LGBTQ+ people, climate or migrants, and that is a gap in our searching as much as a clean bill. The one mark is February 2026, when speeches in Punjab were reported to have likened Imran Khan's complaints about jail to a woman weeping. Former minister Muhammad Ali Durrani urged him to withdraw the remarks and apologise to women, per Dawn.

Nothing fresh has turned up since the Imran Khan stoush, and Dawn's situationer says the outburst raised eyebrows even inside political circles. Honest gap: our page-opening tool was blocked during this check, so this is built from search reports, not full articles, and we found no sourced charity work to put on the other side.