This Sunday early parliamentary elections will take place in Kazakhstan. 107 MPs, including 9 people from the Assembly of Peoples of Kazakhstan and others from Nur Otan, Ak Zhol, Auyl, the Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstn, the Public Social Democratic Party, and the Birlik Party, are due to be elected.
Nurlan Yerimbetov, head of the Public Commission for control over parliamentary elections, co-chairman of the board of trustees of the Center for Analytical Research 'Eurasian Monitoring', stated that more than 10 thousand observers will work at the elections, not including representatives from the parties.
“Now we are observing how the agitation-propaganda campaign before the election is conducted, how all these parties work. And I must tell you that all the parties today, regardless of their orientation, are equally represented in the mainstream and local media. We have 22 people in the Republican Public Commission. These are highly respected people in the country: famous writers, journalists, academics, businessmen. These people are independent and not easily manipulated,” Yerimbetov said, who was the chairman of the Commission last presidential and parliamentary elections.
He says that the huge number of young people who want to be observers is another peculiarity of the election campaign: “They want to participate, they want to be observers. They want to write it in their biographical data later, that they were members of this commission. And they want to see all of this, to understand.”
Moreover, more than 500 observers will come to Kazakhstan from abroad. “Those are CIS countries, the SCO, the OSCE ODIHR. They will travel across the country, and it will be a fresh look from the outside,” Yerimbetov promised.
According to him, the average age of the candidates to the parliament, is 43-44. “There is a rejuvenation of this process. We are going through hard times in economic terms, in international terms, political terms. The parliament must receive interesting, thoughtful, thinking people. The update is very important today. Any election is a test for the party bodies and a measurement of the temperature in society.”
Kazakhstan will have 65 polling stations abroad, including in Russia.
On March 20th the country will vote for its future. "Those are not just big words, that's the way it is,” Nurlan Yerimbetov thinks.
