Opposition to Shun Presidential Ballot

One by one, Tajikistan’s major opposition parties have been ruling themselves out of the November presidential election. According to NBCentralAsia, the opposition has calculated that it is not worth running against the incumbent Imomali Rahmonov when the conditions are so much in his favour.



On September 25, the Islamic Rebirth Party, the only opposition group apart from the Communists to be represented in parliament, announced that it would not be nominating a candidate, but would take part in the election as an observer. The party said it had taken the decision because electoral legislation was too vaguely defined.



The previous day, two other groups, the Social Democrats and the Democratic Party, announced a complete boycott of the vote. Their leaders argued that the current electoral law was not legitimate since it had been approved in 2004 in breach of the constitution.



This means only four candidates will be running against President Rahmonov, who has been nominated by the governing People’s Democratic Party, PDP.



NBCentralAsia analysts say the three candidates put up by the Socialist, Agrarian and Economic Reforms parties come from the academic world and have little chance of success. Only the Communists, who came a distant second after the PDP in the 2005 election to win four seats in parliament, could offer some kind of challenge.



NBCentralAsia’s political experts point out that the prevailing political mood in Tajikistan does not favour challengers to the incumbent. A voting population for whom the horrors of civil war are still recent memory mostly credit Rahmonov with establishing peace, and are unlikely to vote against him.



This is the main factor deterring the opposition from putting up candidates, the analysts say. These parties do not want to waste precious resources on an election whose outcome is already known.



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