Has the lion been tamed? None the less, it would be fair to say that if the failure of Pakistan's political system has a face, then Mr Sharif's cherubic features would once have fitted the bill. That leaves one question hanging over the victor of this election: can he possibly live down the memory of his first two stints as prime minister? In his political heartland of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, Mr Sharif's supporters call him the "lion." Can this 63‑year‑old lion possibly change his game? Or is he fated to symbolise the worst of a political system based on patronage, power-hunger and preservation of privilege? Those closest to him insist that he is a changed man. Throughout the election campaign, his favourite daughter, Maryam, 39, has been his principal cheerleader. While canvassing voters from her bullet-proof car in the old town of Lahore, she told journalists: "He's a thinker now. The trouble is that when Mr Sharif last had the chance to do something for Pakistan, things did not turn out well. His first term as prime minister between 1990 and 1993 ended in ignominy when he was sacked by the president for alleged corruption. That experience meant that when he won the 1996 election - requiring the famous tax declaration on his nomination papers - Mr Sharif harboured an obsessive desperation to cling to power. First, he rewrote the constitution to ban the president from ever sacking a prime minister again. Then Mr Sharif moved to neutralise every other centre of power. When parliament proved troublesome, another amendment made MPs legally obliged to vote according to the party line. As for the judiciary, his idea of responding to a charge of contempt was to boycott the hearing and send a mob of supporters instead, who duly ransacked the Supreme Court in 1997 and threatened the judges. Along the way, Mr Sharif's last government armed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, tested nuclear weapons (in response to earlier detonations in India) and blundered into an undeclared war that cost hundreds of lives by sending Pakistani troops deep into Indian-held territory during the Kargil affair in 1999. But there was one institution that Mr Sharif failed to subdue: Pakistan's all-powerful army. The prime minister tried his best, sacking the army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, while the latter was in mid-air, en route to Pakistan from an official visit to Sri Lanka. That decision sealed Mr Sharif's downfall. Desperate to prevent the general from getting back to the country and taking revenge by launching a coup, he ordered Karachi airport not to allow the plane to land. The runway of Pakistan's busiest airport was duly blocked with three fire engines. Meanwhile, Pakistan International Airlines flight PK805, an Airbus A300 with Gen Musharraf and 197 other passengers on board, was told that it could not land in Pakistan. There was a problem: the aircraft had insufficient fuel to go anywhere else. "I advised Karachi air traffic control that I had 198 souls on board, a limited amount of fuel and that if we were not allowed to land, we would lose the aircraft and that would be end of the story," the flight's captain later recalled. At the last moment, with the plane down to seven minutes of fuel, the army took control of Karachi airport and allowed the Airbus to land. Once on the ground, Gen Musharraf immediately overthrew Mr Sharif, consigning him first to prison and then into exile. The deposed prime minister paid the traditional price of political failure in Pakistan: Mr Sharif was assailed by criminal cases and soon accumulated a battery of convictions. In 2000, he was found guilty of hijacking and corruption and banned from holding office for 21 years. He lived in luxurious exile in Saudi Arabia until 2007, when Gen Musharraf's regime became so discredited and unpopular that opponents of military rule were allowed to return. Mr Sharif flew back to Pakistan, but those court verdicts prevented him from contesting the last election in 2008. All the convictions were overturned the following year, clearing the way for yesterday's triumph. The claim that Mr Sharif is a changed man cannot be dismissed. Western diplomats speak privately of a more mature politician, ready to compromise in the interests of Pakistan. President Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of the late Benazir Bhutto, is one of Mr Sharif's oldest political foes. The outgoing government was deeply unpopular and Mr Sharif, whose PML-N party held 91 seats on the opposition benches, might have been expected to take his first opportunity to turf out the president's administration. He chose not to. Instead, Mr Sharif's restraint was one of the factors allowing the last government to be the first civilian administration in Pakistan's history to serve a full term. Experts who observed the vindictive politician of old believe that Mr Sharif might indeed have changed. "He is more diplomatic and more pragmatic than he used to be," says Osama Siddique, from the policy department at Lahore University of Management Sciences. He still has a lot of issues, but he has learnt from taking on the military and judiciary head on. Other factors might also keep Mr Sharif on the straight and narrow. Imran Khan, the cricket captain turned party leader, won 35 seats in this election, up from zero in the last parliament. Mr Khan never had a realistic chance of winning outright, but he could now become a formidable opposition leader, capable of making Mr Sharif pay a heavy price for any transgressions. The fact that this election saw a turnout of about 60 per cent - exceptionally high by Pakistani standards - will strengthen the country's democracy. Meanwhile, the local media is more diverse and outspoken than ever before, with a plethora of new television news channels. In one respect, nothing is likely to change. Pakistan's tortured cooperation with the West against terrorism will remain the preserve of the army and the security establishment. The core leadership of al-Qaeda remains based on the frontier with Afghanistan and Mr Sharif, the arch pragmatist, will not turn away from America and the West. On the contrary, he sent reassuring signals in his recent interview with The Sunday Telegraph. But there remains the shadow cast by his record in office. As the results came in at his campaign headquarters, Mr Sharif was asked about his mistakes in power. "There are so many things playing on my mind," he replied. I can't remember those mistakes.