In post-Soviet Central Asia, presidential elections are routine affairs. In a region where power has very seldom been transferred at the ballot box and where governments and opposition simply do not talk to one another, competitive elections have come to display some very paradoxical features.
While the multi-party appearance of Central Asia’s elections has been almost entirely fictional, their multi-candidate nature has often been farcical. There has been more than one occasion in which candidates have publicly expressed support for the incumbent leader. Take the case of Kazakhstani politician Mels Yeleusizov, who reportedly advanced an environmentalist agenda for the presidential election of April 2011: his vote – as he candidly admitted while leaving the polling station – was cast in favour of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Likewise, take a look at Uzbek presidential hopeful Abdulhafiz Jalalov, who did not hesitate to vote for incumbent leader Islam Karimov in the 2000 presidential election. Rather than respond to the electorate’s democratic rights, Central Asia’s electoral practice responds to the power preservation priorities of the regimes which emerged in the region since the early 1990s.
Electoral tricks
Holding irregular elections remains a recurrent feature of contemporary non-democratic politics: from Vladimir Putin’s inflated victory of March 2012 to the election of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in post-(counter)revolutionary Egypt, there are many ways in which electoral institutions continue to be violated across the globe. Post-Soviet Central Asia, to all intents and purposes, has elevated this authoritarian practice to another level.
