Kyrgyzstan: Weeding the Tulip Garden

Last week, on December 16, Kyrgyzstani voters went to the polls for legislative elections.  Those who have been following the politics in Kyrgyzstan this year will be unsurprised–but perhaps unhappy–to learn that the OSCE had harsh words about the election.  Ferghana.ru reports on the OSCE report card, where officials are calling it a “missed opportunity”.  (Complete text of the OSCE press release is up on the OSCE site. )Instead of a diverse planting of ideas and leadership, Kyrgyzstan's legislature wiill have a monocultural growth–a kind of political desert for ideas and institutions.  This can't be good.

Daniel Shershen of Eurasianet reports that of the 90 seats in the legislature, 76 went to the Ak Zhol party, the political party that President Bakiev (illegally) endorsed in public the week before.  Voters who went to the polls expecting to vote found their names purged from voter lists. 

The opposition party, gained 14 seats, but did not gain clear enough advantage to hang on to all of those seats according to Parliamentary rules.  It's another sign of the shortfalls of Kyrgyzstan's 2005 Tulip Revolution.

New Kyrgyzstan Political Resource: 
Eurasianet has a great, absolutely easy-to-study and thought-provoking special series on Kyrgyzstan's post-Tulip reforms, new directions, and possible solutions, with local accounts, video, and photos. 

Photo: uberreview.com