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Five parties win seats in Kyrgyz parliamentary elections

Kyrgyzstan Materials 11 October 2010 15:44 (UTC +04:00)
Five parties won parliamentary seats in Kyrgyzstan, electoral authorities said Monday, following elections held six months after the overthrow of authoritarian president Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
Five parties win seats in Kyrgyz parliamentary elections

Five parties won parliamentary seats in Kyrgyzstan, electoral authorities said Monday, following elections held six months after the overthrow of authoritarian president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, DPA reported.

The nationalist Ata Zhurt party made an unexpectedly strong showing, holding a narrow lead, according to results from Sunday's election.

The party proved popular among voters in the south of the country, where bloody clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbek nationals claimed 2,000 lives in June.

Which parties would form a coalition in the 120-seat parliament remained unclear Monday.

International observers said the elections had been free and fair. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which deployed hundreds of monitors around the country, said Monday that "voting proceeded in a calm, orderly and transparent manner."

The election campaign had been "highly competitive" and "vibrant," according to the OSCE.

"I have observed many elections in Central Asia over the years but this is the first election where I could not predict the outcome," Morten Hoglund, OSCE coordinator, said.

However, there remained "an urgent need for a profound reform of the electoral legislation," as there had been problems related to vote-counting and voter registration, the OSCE said.

The media had also failed to give enough analytical coverage of political parties to enable voters to make an informed choice.

Thousands of internal migrants and people displaced by the June violence had been disenfranchised by difficulties with residency registration, the OSCE said.

A total of 29 parties contested the weekend election.

   A coalition of Ata Zhurt, the socialist Ata Meken Party, the pro- Russian Ar-Namys party of Felix Kulov and the Respublika party and led by Omurbek Babanov, is seen as a possibility.

   The Ata Meken Party, which was directly involved in the ousting of Bakiyev's Social Democratic Party, also garnered many votes. But political analysts expect that, given wide public dissatisfaction, they would not be able to govern.

The poll was the country's first ever democratic election, setting it apart from its neighbours in Central Asia - Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan - which are dictatorships or semi-dictatorships.

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