On Sunday, the parliamentary elections will take place in Kyrgyzstan. They will be the first in almost a decade of instability. 14 political parties will participate in the elections; and the leader is thought to be the SDPK – the party of President Almazbek Atambayev, after whose coming to power the situation in the country has tended to stabilization. Today 85% of the population supports the President of Kyrgyzstan and 83% support the Eurasian elections, according to Vladimir Lepekhin, Director of the the EurAsEC Institute. “The population is tired of the chaos, revolution, instability and so on. Of course, there is some hope associated with the current leader of the country and with the Eurasian trend. Due to this, not only is the political situation stabilizing, but the economy will develop as well,” Lepekhin says.
According to him, the Eurasian choice will lead to large projects, primarily in the area of production and the formation of the national industry, but this long-term trend won’t be felt in the near future. At the moment, income per capita will fall, and problems won’t be solved at once. “This may be the only and the main factor of instability for certain moods and motives, which are being developed by all sorts of enemies of the country and the EAEC, which are trying to use these moods, showing the public, the voters, that these figures are related to a drop in turnover, the fact that living standards are falling, and so on and so forth, the number of jobs reducing. Therefore, there will be speculation, but the whole significance of the elections is not only in the fact that it is a stage in the political stabilization of the situation in the Republic, but in general that they have very serious geopolitical significance. This is not just a national election, these are elections in a Republic that is now becoming a geopolitical factor, or at least a transregional factor,” the Director of the the EurAsEC Institute thinks.
He believes that the elections should show that “revolutions” have a well-known, normal alternative – democratic elections. The second task is securing some political configuration under the current leadership. “The Social Democrats in the last election were in second place. Now the Social Democratic Party will be the first with a large margin from the rest. This is a trend for real political stability under a leader who has proved that he is thinking clearly, with a completely clear strategy. This strategy is absolutely sovereign, that is, it is not due to the fact that Kyrgyzstan is under the EAEC or, especially, under Russia. It is an equal participant,” Lepekhin says.
