ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) — The president’s party swept Kazakhstan’s parliamentary election, winning all the seats in a vote that was rejected yesterday by the opposition and deemed flawed by international observers.
Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan party received 88 percent of Saturday’s vote, and no other party cleared the 7 percent barrier needed to win a seat in the legislature, according to preliminary results released yesterday by the Central Elections Commission.
The two largest opposition groups condemned the results, saying they were manipulated.
Mr. Nazarbayev, who has ruled the oil-rich Central Asian country since 1989 when it was still a Soviet republic, pledged the elections would be free and fair. He is pushing for Kazakhstan to become chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2009, but the group has delayed making a decision because of concern over Kazakhstan’s commitment to democracy.
The election, which was called two years early after Mr. Nazarbayev pushed through constitutional amendments in May, was widely seen as a maneuver by him to try to improve Kazakhstan’s democratic image while maintaining his grip on power. But there was some hope he was willing to loosen his hold a bit.
The OSCE, which sent more than 400 election observers to Kazakhstan, said there were irregularities in the vote count in more than 40 percent of the polling stations visited, mainly due to procedural problems and a lack of transparency.
Lubomir Kopaj, who heads the long-term election observation mission of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said the results show Kazakhstan still needs to improve its election process.
“I have never seen a democratic country with one political party in parliament,” Mr. Kopaj said at a press conference in the capital, Astana.
The election was expected to slightly improve the position of the opposition, which held only one seat in the outgoing parliament. Instead, the largest opposition groups were shut out.
“We don’t recognize the results of the election. They absolutely do not reflect the actual alignment of political forces and the social support they draw,” Burikhan Nurmukhamedov, a leader of the Ak Zhol party, was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency Interfax.
The elections commission said Ak Zhol received 3.25 percent of the vote, but Mr. Nurmukhamedov said the party’s own surveys indicated it won about 12 percent.
The OSCE mission expressed concern over the requirement that a party garner at least 7 percent of the vote in order to be represented in parliament. The same threshold was introduced in Russia, where parliamentary elections are scheduled for December.
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