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WILL THE UPCOMING PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN UZBEKISTAN BE RADICALLY DIFFERENT?
NAILYA SHAKIROVA,
Journalist, Moscow
The elections to Oliy Majlis (the Parliament) of Uzbekistan will be held in December 2009. Five political parties are going to take part in the election campaign.
Those are the Liberal Democratic Party of Uzbekistan (LDPU), which represents the Uzbek business groups, the People’s Democratic Party (NDP), Democratic National Rebirth Party (Milly Tiklanish), which enjoys the wide support of the Uzbek intelligentsia, the Social-Democratic Party “Adolat” (“Fairness”), and Fedikorlar National Democratic Party (Fedikorlar is translated from Uzbek as “Selfless”). The opposition parties cannot take part in the elections.
Though the parties, which will stand for parliament, represent different social groups, their programs are almost the same, so the elections will not be followed by important political changes.
The main expected change is the replacing of the “favorite party” that, according to the Uzbek authorities' scenario, will get the majority of votes in the elections and will replace the previous leading party. The authorities need such a change in order to show that there is political life in Uzbekistan and that the elections are held in a democratic way.
In the 2004 parliamentary elections the LDPU took the majority of votes – it has 41 MPs, while the NDP, which ranked second, has 28 MPs. The People’s Democratic Party won the 1999 elections and got 48 seats in the Parliament. It is possible that the NDP will try to become “the party of the President” again, which, nevertheless, will not change the political situation in Uzbekistan.
In August 2008 a new non-governmental organization “Environmental Movement of Uzbekistan” was created. According to the Law on Elections to Oliy Majlis of Uzbekistan, the movement has already been given 15 seats in the Parliament. The authorities say that they have made such a decision because the environmental situation in Uzbekistan is bad and because the movement has been set important tasks.
The 2009 election campaign will conform to the new legislative acts: the number of parliamentary seats is increased from 120 to 150. The authorities believe that this measure is to strengthen the role of the political parties.
At what expense is the number of seats increased? According to the law amendments, the parliamentary candidates cannot be nominated by groups of initiators any more. Groups of initiators used to select their parliamentary candidates, and the opposition could propose their candidates through such action groups. Meanwhile, the local election committees mistrusted such candidates. In the 2004 elections sometimes the local election committees did not register the candidates selected by groups of initiators, although all the necessary documents were provided.
According to the statistical data, in 2004 the opposition parties supported 16 candidates selected by groups of initiators and only one candidate from the constituency in Kashkadaria region was registered.
Another legislative change is introduction of the institution of the political party authorized representative, who has the right to participate in the count at elections and verify how correctly the signature lists are made.
This change will facilitate the election holding process, but it will not make elections more transparent. The same thing also holds true for the increase of the potential number of the candidates’ agents from 5 to 10.
August 14, 2009
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