Kazakh Protesters Rally in Almaty After Parliamentary Elections
Kazakh opposition groups protested in central Almaty, the country’s commercial capital, after the only anti-government party failed to win enough votes to secure parliament seats.
“We won’t play by the rules set by the authorities any more and will talk to them differently now,” Zharmakhan Tuyakbay, chairman of the National Social Democratic Party, or OSDP, said at the rally today.
The ruling Nur Otan party garnered 80.99 percent of the vote in Jan. 15 elections, getting 83 seats in the 107-seat Majlis, or lower house of parliament, the Central Electoral Commission said on its website today after 100 percent of votes were counted. The pro-business Akzhol party and the Communists scored above the 7 percent entry barrier to win 8 seats and 7 seats, respectively.
The Peoples’ Assembly comprising Kazakhstan’s ethnic minorities will elect the remaining nine parliament deputies. The OSDP received 1.68 percent, or 116,534 votes, the commission said. Turnout was 75.4 percent.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev, 71, who has ruled the Central Asian state since 1989 in the Soviet era, is seeking to staunch discontent and promote a multiparty system in a nation shaken by mass riots and clashes with the police. Riots broke out last month in an oil-rich region bordering the Caspian Sea in western Kazakhstan, killing 16 people and leaving more than 100 injured in the worst violence since the former Soviet republic won independence two decades ago.
Government Crackdown
About 100 people protested for less than an hour on a square in downtown Almaty. Organizers of the demonstration asked some supporters to skip the rally for fear of a government crackdown, said Bulat Abilov, an OSDP leader.
Young Kazakhs who studied abroad are frustrated by the lack of their ability to change the current “corrupted” political system, said Rauan, 25, a protester who declined to give his full name.
“Young people are fearful of coming out on the streets and only write comments” via the Internet, he said, adding that he graduated from a U.K. university with the help of a Kazakh government grant.
The vote didn’t “meet fundamental principles of democratic elections,” international monitors said yesterday. Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted restrictions placed on political parties and the media, lack of transparency in the counting process and limited public debate, the watchdog’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights said.
No election in Kazakhstan has ever been deemed “free and fair” by the OSCE. Nur Otan won all the seats in Kazakhstan’s legislature in an August 2007 vote. The election law was changed two years later to ensure that if only one party passes the 7 percent threshold, the party with the second-highest number of votes gets no less than two seats.
To contact the reporter on this story: Nariman Gizitdinov in Almaty at ngizitdinov@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net
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