Election Race off to Slow Start

Although three political parties have now announced their candidates for Tajikistan’s November presidential election, they are all academics rather than major political figures, and none looks likely to make much of an impact.



Last week, the Agrarian Party nominated Amirkul Karakulov, deputy head of the country’s Academy of Agrarian Sciences, as its favoured candidate. The Economic Reforms Party nominated Olimjon Boboev, rector of the Transport Institute, while the Socialists produced their chairman Abduhalim Gafforov, who lectures at the State National University.



There is a slight complication here: there have been two warring Socialist Parties since a schism in December 2004, so while Gafforov was nominated by the faction officially registered with the Tajik justice ministry, the others have put their own leader forward as a candidate. However, Mirhusein Narziev – another academic, who works as a research fellow at the Institute of Astrophysics – is unlikely to be allowed to stand, since the authorities do not regard him as a party office-holder.



These first nominations have created a minor stir in a political environment dominated by the governing People’s Democratic Party, PDP. The party is expected to nominate the incumbent Tajik president, Imomali Rahmonov, on September 23.



But the names that have appeared so far are little-known outside the world of academia, and NBCentralAsia’s political observers suggest that they will have trouble gathering the 160,000 signatures each of them needs for the Central Electoral Committee to register them as candidates. The Agrarian Party has around 6,000, the Economic Reforms Party 5,000 while the Socialists had approximately 15,000 before they split in two. Even if all these members were to launch into gathering signatures, the threshold would probably remain unattainable.



Some political commentators say allowing these three parties to nominate presidential contenders is a government tactic designed to give the ballot a veneer of pluralism. This argument is bolstered by the relative ease with which the Agrarians and the Economic Reforms Party - both of which were only founded late last year – won registration with the justice ministry. The officially-sanctioned Socialist faction led by Gafforov, meanwhile, is seen as very close to the PDP.



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