Kyrgyzstan's Crucial Presidential Ballot

On the face of it, everything should be in place for this year’s presidential election in Kyrgyzstan to reap the benefits of recent political reforms, and embed democratic principles. 

In reality, though, voter preferences in the October 30 ballot are likely to be strongly influenced by regional, even tribal allegiances, which remain a central feature of politics in Kyrgyzstan, and elections in particular.

The way parliament operates is a good example of this. In formal terms, the elected parties hammer out policy through legislative debates. In reality, though, the old ways persist, where popularity with voters and policy-making all come down to strong personalities and regional connections, not actual policies or ideas.

Nominations have yet to get under way, but is clear that the front-runners will include many leaders of political parties who are currently in government or parliament. Among the likely contenders are Prime Minister Almazbek Atambaev, who leads the Social Democrats, Deputy Prime Minister and Respublika party chief Omurbek Babanov, and Omurbek Tekebaev of Ata Meken. The Ata-Jurt party will probably nominate its leader Kamchibek Tashiev, while Marat Sultanov of the same party puts himself forward separately.

Then there are Adakhan Madumarov of the Butun Kyrgyzstan party, which narrowly missed getting into parliament in last year’s election, Communist Party head Iskhak Masaliev and Omurbek Suvanaliev of the Ar-Namys party.

The list of likely candidates, each with his own constituency, suggest that whoever wins, the traditional divide between northern and southern Kyrgyzstan will widen.

Last year’s ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan has added a whole different dimension to the electoral landscape. Several days of fighting involving ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in June 2010 in and around Osh and Jalalabad left over 400 people dead and almost 2,000 injured.

Various political parties are now engaged in a blame game, accusing their opponents of bearing some responsibility for the conflict. On the one side, those associated with the interim administration, which emerged following the popular unrest that forced the then president Kurmanbek Bakiev from power in April 2010, are accused of allowing the violence to happen. They in turn accuse their opponents of being reactionaries who would like to turn the clock back to before the April revolt.

Support for political parties is already divided along regional and tribal lines; their popularity will now be additionally determined by this new gulf between “revolutionaries” and “reactionaries”.

Whoever becomes president, it is almost certain that he or – less likely – she is going to be a lot different from the current head of state, Roza Otunbaeva – the first female president in Central Asia, a politician able to work across political divides, and a former diplomat who can deal with the West while maintaining cordial relations with former Soviet states.

The backgrounds of the emerging candidates – all men – suggest they will be inclined to seek most of their external support from post-Soviet states. Significantly, almost all the party leaders paid their respects in Moscow ahead of last year’s ballot. Of Kyrgyzstan’s current political leaders, only Otunbaeva appears comfortable working with western democracies.

The election outcome will therefore present challenges both to the West and to the new head of state, given Kyrgyzstan’s heavy reliance on international aid and loans.

The new leader will also struggle to maintain cross-party relationships across the various parliamentary factions and the partners in the current or future coalition government. That will require the skill to know when decisive leadership is needed, and when a more cautious intervention is called for.

Otunbaeva will not be standing herself; she is automatically excluded by her position as interim head of state for a fixed period.

The fact that as the incumbent, Otunbaeva is leaving office at all is a landmark event in itself. Independent Kyrgyzstan’s two earlier presidents, Askar Akaev and Bakiev, were ejected from office following mass protests, Turkmenistan got a new president only when the first one died in office, and Kazakstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have had the same heads of state since before they became separate countries.

The presidency itself, like other political institutions, has been radically overhauled by the constitution passed in a nationwide referendum at the end of June 2010.

Kyrgyzstan became the first Central Asia state to shift from a political system dominated by a strong president into a parliamentary democracy. A parliamentary election conducted under the new rules last October created a multiparty legislature in which no one group dominates through an absolute majority.

The election will be held under new legislation designed to correct shortcomings noted in the 2010 parliamentary ballot, and more serious problems of earlier years. This suggests that since the parliamentary election was relatively fair, the presidential one will be a genuine contest. One improvement, for example, is the decline in the traditional practice where incumbent politicians help themselves to government resources to ensure they win.

The October ballot will also be a fairly open-ended affair given that Otunbaeva is not standing and none of the likely contenders is in a position to rally overwhelming voter support at the moment. In last year’s election, the five parties that made it into parliament received less than 40 per cent of the vote among them, a clear indication of a fragmented electorate. Parties considering nominating a presidential candidate will have to bear this in mind.

Since the new constitution reduces the powers of a future president, one might reasonably ask – why bother standing?

There are at least three points that still make the position attractive – it provides opportunities to exert control over appointments to key government institutions, to win popular favour, and – down the line – to use one’s position to claw back more powers for the presidency. This latter could entail attempts to rewrite the constitution towards something more like the old one – in other words, reversing the process that has given Kyrgyzstan a parliament-based democracy and greater political pluralism.

As human rights activist Dinara Oshurakhunova warned at a recent meeting of the Institute for Public Policy on June 29, “It is doubtful that the next president will agree to the same degree of authority that Otunbaeva has now – it’s more likely that he will seek to expand them.”

Medet Tiulegenov is a lecturer in political science at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.