A bad day in Pakistan, and it’s going to get worse: in three days’ time a man ill-suited to be president is probably going to sweep into that office. Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, has all but secured his elevation on Saturday, but the deals that he appears to have struck to buy that passage suggest that he has no great loyalty to her principles, including her general support for the US. Nor, most seriously, does he seem to have a clear plan for the economic crisis that Pakistan now faces.

This week, in an expensive comment on the turmoil, the bond and swaps markets reckoned that Pakistan’s government debt was the riskiest in the world, putting the threat of default above that in Argentina. Citibank, in a new report, recommended that Pakistan seek help from the International Monetary Fund to avoid that fate within months. Easier said than done. In Pakistan the initials “IMF” will provoke an extra prickle of the antiWestern suspicion that is already running dangerously high, despite nine years of calm relations. The IMF, for its part, has hardly forgotten its furious rows with Pakistan’s governments during the “lost decade” of the 1990s – most of all because of Bhutto’s failure to quell corruption in her party or make reforms.

Pervez Musharraf, when President, was prone to invite those he thought were on his side over to Army House for hot chocolate, a childish comfort in more than adult times. As he sits, still, in that fortified mansion, brooding over his eviction from office and perhaps still sipping that drink, he can credit himself with getting the economy right, even if he flunked democracy. The IMF, after a stroppy interlude with the Government of Nawaz Sharif in 1997-99, only relaxed as Musharraf and his technocrats made more people pay taxes, cut deficits and attracted investment. The “9/11 dividend”, after Musharraf backed the US, helped too.

Now we are back two decades, in just a few months. The huge leap in food and fuel prices had already ensured that the new Government would have a savagely difficult economic challenge, never mind the tattered Constitution, and the difficulty of glueing together any coalition. But the worry is that Zardari has so far shown a surer instinct for striking deals to win power than for saving Pakistan once he gets it.

In securing support from three of the four provincial assemblies (which, together with the national Parliament, elect the president), he has outstepped Sharif. But he has done so, for example, by agreeing to reopen two radical madrassas that were closed over their links to terrorism, in an attempt to get Jamiat Ulema Islam, a pro-Taleban group, to support him. That move will undermine attempts to fight terrorism on the western border.

But the first problems will be on the economy, where Zardari, with a reputation as an intellectual lightweight compared with Bhutto, and immersed in politicking, has not offered a reassuring plan. There are stories of him delivering rambling lectures to expert economists, forestalling their advice.

In which case, the questions become whether he has risen on the freak circumstances of his wife’s assassination and, lacking her popularity, whether his tenure will be short.

Times Recommends

• ‘Thousands of Tamils dying’ in Sri Lanka camp
• Jackson 'rebuilt his nose before he died'
• Tehran: militiamen attack protesters