Presidential party expected to claim all seats in Kyrgyz parliament after 16 December elections
17 December 2007
According to preliminary results, in the parliamentary elections that took place in Kyrgyzstan on 16 December, president Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s Ak-Jol party is expected to have won all 90 seats in parliament. The polls were the first under the new election law, which stipulates that elections take place solely on the basis of party lists, and which furthermore has increased the number of seats in parliament from 75 to 90. Based on the early results, announced on 17 December, the Ak-Jol party leads with nearly 48 percent of the vote. The opposition Ata-Meken party of former parliament speaker Omurbek Tekebayev comes in second with ca. 9 percent of the vote, and is the only party that also managed to pass the 5 percent barrier to enter parliament. However, as Ata-Meken failed to meet the extra requirement of taking 0.5 percent of the vote in each of Kyrgyzstans 9 voting districts (7 regions and Kyrgyzstan’s 2 main cities, Bishkek and Osh), it will not get into the parliament. Ata-Meken did not get enough votes in the southern part of the country, which can be seen as president Bakiyev’s stronghold. However, a case on the legality of the 0.5% barrier is still pending with the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, opposition parties are accusing the authorities of violations of the election law, including vote rigging and ballot stuffing, and have already announced that they will not accept the outcomes of the elections. According to Rosa Otunbaeva, former Foreign Minister and co-leader of the Social-Democratic party, “in the Osh and Jalalabad regions, local authorities falsified the voting, and used their administrative resources very openly, rudely, as special forces.” The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) called the elections ‘a step backward compared to the previous elections in 2005,’ and specifically mentioned the lack of transparency as being worrisome. The Kyrgyz opposition has threatened to take action if its blocked from joining the parliament.
