 Kazakhstan
Kazakh president gains third term as observers attack ballot methods
December 6, 2005
Tuesday
ALMATY.
Nursultan Nazarbayev secured a third term as president of Kazakhstan with 91 per cent of
the vote, in the latest election in a former Soviet state to be criticised by observers as
falling short of international standards.
The result gave
a further indication that the wave of pro-democracy revolutions that swept through
Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan might be fizzling out, after last month's disputed
parliamentary poll in Azerbaijan.
Preliminary
results of Sunday's election gave Mr Nazarbayev's main opposition challenger, Zharmakhan
Tuyakbai, only 6.64 per cent, and a second opposition candidate, Alikhan Baimenov, a mere
1.65 per cent.
Mr Tuyakbai
denounced "unprecedented violations of the constitution and electoral laws" and
suggested the vote showed that Kazakhstan was "turning from an authoritarian regime
intoa totalitarian one".
His campaign
team pledged a legal challenge, and said it had sought official permission to hold
demonstrations once a temporary ban on protests expired on December 14.
An international
observer mission led by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)
found "some improvements" over Kazakh parliamentary polls last year, where the
opposition won only one of 77 seats.
But it said the
election did not meet a number of international standards, citing cases of multiple
voting, ballot box stuffing and tampering with results.
Those
assessments contrasted sharply with Mr Nazarbayev's earlier pledges that the election
wouldbe fair, and his declaration on Sunday that it wastaking place in "unprecedented
democratic conditions".
Yesterday, he
said Kazakhs had voted for "calmness and stability". He added that promised
political reforms would be his third-termpriority.
The 90 per
cent-plus vote puts the Kazakh leader in the same bracket numerically at least as his
autocratic central Asian neighbours Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan and Islam Karimov
of Uzbekistan.
One European
diplomat in Almaty, Kazakhstan's biggest city, warned that the result and the observers'
verdict could complicate Mr Nazarbayev's ambitions to chair the OSCE in 2009.
Mr Nazarbayev's
"soft authoritarian" methods, however, along with fast-growing output from the
country's vast oil and gas reserves, have delivered higher living standards and made
Kazakhstan the most advanced central Asian state.
Vladimir Putin,
Russia's president, was the first foreign leader to congratulate Mr Nazarbayev in a phone
call yesterday.
Russia's
observer mission was one of several to declare the elections democratic.
By NEIL BUCKLEY
Financial Times
(London, England)
http://www.eurasia.org.ru
08 Dec 2005 |