President’s party gets 100 per cent of the seats (with less than 50 per cent of the vote)
Bishkek (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s Ak-Zhol (Bright Path) Party has been accused of election rigging and profiting from a sham election law.
With 81 per cent of all polling stations reporting their results from yesterday’s elections, Ak Zhol won 47.8 per cent of the vote announced the Election Commission. Only one other party, the Ata-Menken (Fatherland) Socialist Party, got 9.28 per cent of the vote, clearing the 5 per cent threshold needed to gain seats in parliament. However, by failing to reach 0.5 per cent of the vote in each of Kyrgyzstan’s seven regions, and its two main cities the Ata Meken Socialist Party did not meet the second condition needed to elect members of parliament. Thus Ak-Zhol will get all 90 seats of parliament.
Other parties complained that the poll was rigged, full of irregularities including the stuffing of ballot boxes, bribery and intimidation. Many people found themselves unable to vote because their names were not on voters’ lists.
The electoral law has been harshly criticised because it tailored made for the ruling party. It was adopted in October just before the president called for fresh elections, the first since 2005 when street protests pushed out then President Askav Akayev and brought Bakiyev to power.
Since then the government has been held in check by the parliamentary majority elected under Akayev and street protests organised by both opposition and government parties.
The Ata-Meken Socialist Party accused supporters of the Ak-Zhol Party of paying voters at some polling stations 300 soms (about US$ 9) to cast ballots for Ak-Zhol. Its leader Omurbek Tekebaev charged Ak-Zhol with fraud saying that his party would take action after results were officially announced.
The Ak Zhol Party also accused its adversaries of vote buying by giving out vodka and coal.
Today the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which fielded 270 observers across the country announced that the elections failed to meet international standards, saying that they “represented a missed opportunity and fell short of public expectations for further consolidation of the election process.”
The election in the small Central Asian nation was closely followed by other countries. The United States, China and Russia are all vying for influence in the strategically-located country, which is also home to the last US military base in the region.
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