Flawed Election Dents OSCE Chairmanship Bid

Kazakstan’s chances of chairing the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, in 2009 have been significantly reduced by the Nur Otan party’s landslide victory in the August 18 polls, say NBCentralAsia observers.



Parliamentary elections to the lower house or Majilis were held on August 18 with President Nursultan Nazarbaev’s Nur Otan winning 88 per cent of the vote. None of the six other parties that stood won the minimum seven per cent needed to secure a seat.



On the eve of elections, the chairman of the United States Congress’s Helsinki Commission, Alcee Hastings, warned that Kazakstan’s bid to chair the OSCE in 2009 would depend “in no small measure” on the preparations for and conduct of the polls.



When the results came in on August 19, the head of the OSCE observer mission, Lubomir Kopaj, said that while the election demonstrated progress toward democracy, it did not meet all the OSCE’s standards.



Kopaj told journalists he had “never seen a democratic country which has one party”.



NBCentralAsia commentators say that such assessments of the election process, the count and the actual result will reduce Kazakstan’s chances of winning the OSCE chair.



Nazarbaev has been pushing for this bid since 2003, but the OSCE has delayed its final decision until the end of this year after member states failed to reach agreement on whether Kazakstan was a suitable candidate.



Political analyst Dosym Satpaev suggests that the outcome of this election will be met with scepticism among OSCE members, just as the 2005 presidential election raised eyebrows when Nazarbaev won over 90 per cent of the vote.



“At that time some were amused and others angered, because it is [only] authoritarian leaders who win percentages like that,” he said.



“Nur Otan’s victory us going to be seen as an attempt by the Kazak authorities to shut out the opposition. So I think Kazakstan’s chances of chairing the OSCE have gone down.”



Media-watcher Daur Dosybiev argues that while Kazakstan has some political leverage – for instance its rich fuel resources, and the support it has from certain European countries as well as Russia - its chances of chairing the OSCE were never very high in the first place.



“It is unlikely that [OSCE members] will want to see as their chairman a country that violates all… standards so cynically and openly,” he said.





(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)