AP News, August 16th, 2007
Kazakhstan will hold parliamentary elections this weekend _ an early vote seen as a maneuver by the long-ruling president to improve the ex-Soviet republic's poor democratic image without loosening his grip on power.
Kazakhstan is the wealthiest and most stable nation in Central Asia. The country's stability is especially significant to regional powers Russia and China because of its substantial oil and gas reserves. The United States has also sought greater access to Kazakh energy resources.
The Nur Otan party of President Nursultan Nazarbayev is widely expected to sweep most of the 98 seats in the lower house of parliament to be filled in Saturday's vote, which comes after key constitutional changes. But the election is also expected to slightly improve the position of the opposition, which held only one seat in the outgoing parliament.
It is crucial for Nazarbayev to gain international recognition that his government is moving toward democracy before the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe decides in December on whether Kazakhstan should head the group in 2009.
Last December, the OSCE put off a vote on Kazakhstan's bid, citing a failure to meet the group's democratic standards. None of the elections held by Kazakhstan since it became independent in the 1991 Soviet collapse have been assessed as free and fair by the OSCE.
This year's campaign has been low-key and dominated by Nur Otan. The opposition parties appeared to have better access to the media than in previous years. However, the main opposition National Social Democratic Party complained that the country's main television channel, which partially belongs to the state, refused to air some of its campaign advertisements.
Nazarbayev has pledged "to do everything to make the elections free and fair."
But a leading opposition figure, Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, who until his early release last year was the country's highest-profile political prisoner, called the process "a shameful farce."
"This time around, too, the president has used all the resources of the state apparatus to ensure his party's victory," he said in a statement Tuesday.
Nazarbayev, 67, has brought relative prosperity to the nation of 15 million, which has enjoyed double-digit economic growth in recent years. But during his 18-year rule he has been accused of autocratic policies and nepotism in filling key government and business posts.
Nazarbayev called elections two years early after ambiguous constitutional changes in May that removed all presidential term limits and gave him the right to dissolve parliament virtually for any reason.
___
Associated Press writer Bagila Bukharbayeva in Moscow contributed to this report.
