The ruling coalition now appears more secure than for many months. In early May the government announced that the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-i-Azam), or PML (Q), the party that supported the previous president, Pervez Musharraf, would join the government. A power-sharing agreement signed on May 1st stipulated that the PML (Q) would be given several cabinet posts, including the newly created position of deputy prime minister, and that the PML (Q) and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), which leads the coalition government, would contest the next general election, due by 2013, together. On May 2nd a total of 14 PML (Q) members of parliament joined the cabinet. The main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), or PML (N), denounced the arrangement and the inclusion of PML (Q) legislators in the cabinet as hypocritical, given that the PML (Q) and PPP have a long history of mutual animosity.

Following the decision by the PML (Q) to join the government, an estranged ally of the PPP, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), agreed to become part of a broader coalition. The MQM had been part of the ruling coalition, but it left the government in January after a dispute with the PPP over fuel price rises. The MQM is likely to be given four federal ministries as well as two state ministries. The decision by the PML (Q) to join the government gave the coalition a comfortable majority and allowed the government to refuse the MQM's demand that it be given the foreign affairs portfolio.

Many of the MQM's demands revolve around parochial concerns relating to its heartland of Karachi, the capital of Sindh province. The MQM has claimed that its party workers are being targeted in violent attacks in the city, and it also has concerns regarding recent changes to electoral boundaries. On May 3rd some parts of Karachi were placed under curfew and businesses shut following the assassination of a prominent MQM activist, Farooq Baig, and the deaths of four more people in the subsequent violence, which included arson attacks and shootings.

The government's attempt to build a broad-based ruling coalition has been further demonstrated by continuing attempts to persuade the Jamaat Ulema-i-Islam (Fazl), or JUI (F), to return to the coalition, after that party left the government in December last year. The leader of the JUI (F), Fazlur Rehman, rebuffed overtures from the PPP, and the PML (Q) leader, Shujaat Chaudhry, has therefore now been assigned the task of trying to entice the JUI (F) back into government.