ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- As elections to local councils were held in Kyrgyzstan this weekend, leading members of the Social Democrats opposition party were beginning stints behind bars after police raided the party’s offices just days before the vote.
Officially, party chairman Temirlan Sultanbekov and election campaign manager Irina Karamushkina were arrested on charges of vote-buying.
But with the criminal investigation accompanying the Social Democrats’ exclusion from the Bishkek City Council race on November 17, it is no surprise that the incident is viewed as the latest symptom of the Kyrgyz regime’s allergy to pluralism.
In the four years since President Sadyr Japarov and his allies took power, Kyrgyzstan’s reputation as a democratic outlier in authoritarian Central Asia has been dealt one blow after another, with crackdowns on the media, civil society, and political opponents.
In the political realm, that trend has prompted concerns over whether Kyrgyz elections -- traditionally vibrant and feisty -- might soon look a lot like the ones held in neighboring countries.
No Criticism, Please
Japarov, 55, came to power on the back of postelectoral unrest that broke out in 2020, a time when he was imprisoned on hostage-taking charges that he has insisted were politically motivated.
His dramatic “prison to the presidency” rise was confirmed in January of the following year in an election that he won by a landslide.
But while he enjoyed clear advantages in that vote -- he was de facto already running the country and several strong would-be candidates decided not to challenge him -- it was still fairly competitive.
Of the 16 candidates he faced, several were strong critics of his and one even accused him of corruption on live national television.
Everything that has happened since then suggests there will not be another election like that under the current leadership.
Former national-security chief Adil Segizbaev, the candidate who made those accusations, went on to spend more than a year in prison on abuse of power charges after being arrested after the vote, while a teenage blogger that reposted the clip spent several months in a jail cell.
A number of other candidates from that presidential contest have also spent time in jail or under house arrest.
And parliament has had the strength sucked out of it.
Adakhan Madumarov, the second-place finisher in the 2021 presidential election, was stripped of his mandate and arrested on treason charges in 2023.
Nurjigit Kadyrbekov, a charismatic, YouTube-friendly politician with strong ties to religious groups, also relinquished his seat in the legislature.
Kadyrbekov and the Iyman Nuru party that he led were only occasionally critical of the government and could not be classed as opposition.
But their popularity might have looked like a threat.
Multiple polls funded by the International Republican Institute showed Kadyrbekov as the third most popular/trusted politician behind Japarov and his de facto co-ruler, the chairman of the State Committee for National Security, Kamchybek Tashiev.
Kadyrbekov quit parliament quietly after an investigation was suddenly opened into alleged accounting irregularities at a charitable fund he once ran.
Authorities said the fund had not properly accounted for millions of dollars in funding for religious education from the Turkish government. He has so far avoided jail.
All Politics Is Local
Compared to national politics, local elections carry low stakes.
And thanks to the centralizing reforms championed by Japarov, they have fallen even lower.
Just as the parliament relinquished power to the executive after a new constitution was passed in 2021, so, too, did city councils, who no longer elect mayors.
City chiefs are instead now handpicked by the president, making the position even more politically dependent on the center than it was before.
But parties and politicians still want their seat at the table, especially in the capital, Bishkek, and the southern city of Osh, where there is a lot of business to be done.
A total of 39 parties and more than 5,000 candidates were on the ballot in local votes across the country on November 17.
Despite their exclusion from the Bishkek race, the Social Democrats were able to compete in smaller elections and passed the 5 percent threshold to enter city councils in five provincial towns.
The party has plenty of recognition, being a reregistered and downsized version of one that served as Kyrgyzstan’s de facto ruling party for the best part of a decade and is still closely associated with former President Almazbek Atambaev.
But history points to Kyrgyz political parties suffering after their leadership comes under serious pressure.
Iyman Nuru, which was ranked the most-liked party according to polling supported by the International Republican Institute in May 2023, did not compete in the Bishkek and Osh city council races and only entered six races nationwide.
Madumarov’s Butun Kyrgyzstan party only competed in one local election, in the southern town of Kerben, where it passed the threshold.
The pick of the pro-government bunch in terms of council seats across the country was a party called Jana Kyrgyzstan (New Kyrgyzstan), with no history as such, but strong ties to the ruling duo.
Thus far, the publicly available evidence for the vote-buying accusation against the Social Democrats is a purported telephone conversation between Karamushkina and another member of the party that somehow made its way onto the Internet.
Although the two talk about handing out money, Kadyr Atambaev -- the former president’s son and a senior party member -- has argued that they were discussing payments for campaign activists.
Party leader Sultanbekov, 26, was reportedly questioned for more than 20 hours on November 13-14.
Speaking in parliament last week, Tashiev said that Social Democrat party activists were “directly involved” in vote-buying.
But the national-security boss, who recently pledged that the days of government interference in elections were over, provided no evidence to back up that assertion.
Commenting on the developments, journalist Rinat Tuhvatshin, the co-founder of the Kloop investigative and news media outlet, which has been blocked in Kyrgyzstan since last year, wrote that Kyrgyz officials had managed “to collapse trust not only in these fairly insignificant elections, but any future elections that will be held under the current regime.”
That was even more damaging since “despite all the challenges, [elections] had remained an important institution in our society,” remarked Tuhvatshin.
