Landslide win for Kazakh ruling party, observers troubled

Kazakh Prezident Nursultan Nazarbayev casting his ballot at a polling station in Astana on Sunday

The ruling party of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev yesterday scored a landslide victory with over 80 percent of the vote in parliamentary polls, which observers said failed to meet democratic standards.
Two nominally opposition groups won seats for the first time in the Kazakh parliament after Sunday’s elections which veteran leader Nazarbayev hoped would breathe fresh life into politics while maintaining stability.
Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan party won 80.74 percent of the vote in the polls, the central election commission announced.
But international observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the elections “did not meet fundamental principles of democratic elections” and had been marked by a lack of transparency in counting, as well as cases of electoral fraud.
“Genuine pluralism does not need the orchestration we have seen,” Miklos Haraszti, the head of the Election Observation Mission of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said.
“This election took place in a tightly controlled environment, with serious restrictions on citizens’” electoral rights, he added.
Nur Otan will be joined in parliament by the pro-business Ak Zhol (Bright Path) party, which garnered 7.46 percent of the vote and the Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstan – a largely pro-government group that won 7.2 percent.
None of the other four parties contesting the election in the resource-rich nation broke through the seven-percent threshold and will remain shut out of parliament.
The only vehemently anti-government group – the All-National Social Democratic Party (OSDP) – won just 1.59 percent of the vote.
But the polls were overshadowed by concerns about Kazakhstan’s stabiliity after December clashes between striking oil workers and security forces killed 16 people in the Central Asian state’s worst bloodshed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“This is our shared victory,” Nazarbayev told his supporters moments after the results were announced. “This means that the people of Kazakhstan will continue supporting our course of stability and unity.”
The anti-government opposition has already alleged that the elections were marred by flagrant violations. But Nazarbayev said on Sunday that the polls were “unprecedented in their transparency, openness and honesty”.
Western monitors have never before recognised a Kazakh ballot as free or fair – an issue that has irritated Nazarbayev’s advisers as they position the region’s largest economy toward future growth.
“If Kazakhstan is serious about their stated goals of increasing the number of parties in parliament, then the country should have allowed more genuine opposition parties to participate in this election,” said the OSCE mission’s special coordinator João Soares.