FACTBOX-Bhutto's widower Pakistan presidential candidate

(Reuters) - The party of Pakistan's assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto is nominating her widower Asif Ali Zardari to replace President Pervez Musharraf, who resigned last week under threat of impeachment.

Pakistan will hold a presidential election on September 6. Under the constitution members of the country's four provincial assemblies and the national parliament elect the new president.

Here are some facts about Zardari:

* As Bhutto's widower, a former minister in one of her governments, and leader of her Pakistan People's Party, the telegenic Zardari, 55, might seem an obvious choice for the PPP. But he is a divisive figure who has wrestled with allegations of corruption for years.

* After Bhutto's death in December, Zardari was named co-chairman of the PPP along with his son, but the latter is still in university and essentially a figurehead.

* Under Zardari, the PPP won the most seats in a February parliamentary election. He then brokered a majority coalition with Bhutto's nemesis, ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

* However, the PPP's unwillingness to move swiftly ahead to reinstate judges Musharraf sacked threatens to tear apart the coalition as militant violence spreads and financial markets sag. The reluctance is partly on concern the deposed chief justice might hear challenges to an amnesty granted Zardari and other party leaders from graft charges last year, analysts say.

* Even some Bhutto supporters regard him as a flawed character whose taste for power and the high life undermined her legacy. Zardari, who spent eight years in jail on corruption and drug-smuggling charges, denies any wrongdoing, accusing Bhutto's political opponents of concocting the allegations to ruin them. * Zardari married Bhutto in an arranged union brokered by their mothers in 1987. The son of a politician from Bhutto's party, Zardari had the right political pedigree, but it was an uneven match in family wealth and status.

* Zardari's family owned some farm land and a cinema in Karachi and indulged his passion for polo, but the Bhutto clan was one of Pakistan's feudal landowners, an elite that has traditionally dominated business and party politics.

* Within months of Benazir Bhutto's first election victory in 1988, allegations of suspicious deals involving state money and Zardari started to surface in newspapers. The then-president dismissed her government for corruption and misrule in 1990.

* Zardari, sometimes called "Mr 10 Percent", accused Bhutto's successor Sharif of trumping up allegations he had siphoned off state funds and taken multi-million-dollar kickbacks.

* For some Pakistanis though, Zardari showed genuine strength of character during his time in jail, which took a toll on his health. On a personal level, his marriage with Bhutto, which produced two daughters and a son, was viewed as a success.

(For a related story see PAKISTAN-POLITICS or double click on )

(Writing by Jerry Norton and Mark Bendeich; Editing by Kamran Haider and David Fox)