ISLAMABAD -- Pakistan's fledgling Parliament was Saturday to debate its first national budget amid fears of a showdown between government and opposition parties who want President Pervez Musharraf to quit as army chief and submit to elections. Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali said the 14.5 billion-dollar budget, to be presented by Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz, would be "welfare-orientated", aimed at eradicating poverty and boosting economic growth, AFP reported.2

But opposition parties have warned the budget may struggle to see the light of day, amid a snowballing campaign to grind the eight-month-old Parliament to a halt in protest at Musharraf's unwillingness to surrender self-declared rule.

They are demanding that Musharraf, the army chief who stole power in a 1999 coup and declared himself both President and army chief until 2007, step down from both posts and submit to a standard presidential election.

"The session will be stormy and our protest will be vociferous," Siddiqul Farooq, spokesman for ousted premier Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) told AFP.

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People Party (PPP) also vowed the proceedings will be disrupted.

"The finance minister's speech will be punctuated with oppositions slogans of 'Go, Go' and 'No, No'," said PPP spokesman Nazir Dhoki. "There will be chaos if the government tries to forcibly throw out opposition MPs from the house," he said. "If they try to bulldoze the opposition, it will bury the system."

Pakistan's loose alliance of opposition parties has been increasingly on a collision course with Musharraf following a series of moves against antigovernment MPs seen by many as an attempt to squeeze them into submission.

For three consecutive days last week police arrested opposition MPs from Punjab Province as they protested outside the chamber, after the Parliament's pro-Musharraf speaker banned them from entering.

The Islamist North West Frontier Province (NWFP) government this week saw its chief bureaucrat and police chief removed by the federal government, two days after it voted to make Islamic sharia law supreme in the border province.

Prime Minister Jamali Friday held his second meeting within 24 hours with Akram Durrani, chief minister of the MMA-led NWFP in an attempt to rein in the opposition. An official statement described the meeting as "important" and said the men had discussed "a broad spectrum of political issues."

The prime minister said he believed in "tolerance and accommodation as far as resolution of political differences is concerned", the statement said.

"Both the leaders hoped that they would be able to resolve their differences in a spirit of democracy and in the best interest of democratic system," it said.

Government-opposition talks last month failed to produce a compromise on the political crisis, also centring on constitutional changes imposed unilaterally by Musharraf.