Kuntavaalitulos ei ole koko totuus, vaan paljon on kiinni myös siitä, miten neuvottelut luottamuspaikoista sujuvat. Hyvä neuvottelija voi nostaa puolueensa asemaa kokoaan suuremmaksi.
By Reuters Staff
3 Min Read
ALMATY/NUR-SULTAN (Reuters) - Kazakhstan’s ruling party was set to sweep Sunday’s parliamentary election, as it has done for decades, with no major opposition groups running in the vote and small street protests rapidly quelled by police.
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The country’s 80-year-old ex-president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who stepped down in 2019, remains hugely influential as chairman of the national security council and leader of the Nur Otan party, which controls 84 of 107 seats in the outgoing lower house.
Nur Otan won almost 72% of Sunday’s vote, according to exit polls by local pollster, Public Opinion research institute. As with the current legislature, two other parties cleared the 7% threshold to win some seats.
Year 2020 in Review: Kazakhstan Struggling With Structural Reform Amid COVID-19 Crisis
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 18 Issue: 14
Former president Nursultan Nazarbaev votes during the January 2021 parliamentary elections in Kazakhstan (Source: economy.kz)
As in much of the rest of the world, the year 2020 in Kazakhstan was dominated by the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, which to date has claimed the lives of more than 2,300 Kazakhstanis, according to a government-run information portal. Since August 2020, the authorities have been keeping separate records of people who have been sick with severe pneumonia that resembles the novel coronavirus but had nonetheless tested negative for SARS-Cov-2. To date, more than 530 within that category have died. Official Kazakhstani statistics have been regularly subject to speculation regarding their accuracy and objectivity, although this tendency to question government data is certainly not unique to Kazakhstan or even its i
Central Asian Elections Update
Baiterek Tower in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan (Francisco Anzola, https://flic.kr/p/2htLiaw; CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).
As the U.S. reeled from violence at the Capitol, two Central Asian countries held elections that were both uncompetitive and unsurprising. On Jan. 10, voters in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan took to the polls in elections that did not portend a change from the status quo. Following an October 2020 revolution in Kyrgyzstan that led to the resignation of the country’s former leader, voters elected Sadyr Japarov, a populist and a convicted kidnapper, as the new president. Kyrgyzstan’s voters also passed a constitutional referendum that promised Japarov sweeping new powers in his first term.