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Columbia Faculty Analyze Major Elections Underway Around the Globe

Jul. 27, 2009

A billboard advertising President Bakiev for the 2009 presidential election in Kyrgyzstan

Image credit: Firespeaker

Kyrgyzstan: Presidential Elections, July 23

In February, Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiev announced that his country would accept $2.15 billion in Russian aid and that the United States had six months to leave Manas Air Base, a key logistical platform in Kyrgyzstan supporting American military operations in nearby Afghanistan. Russia had been pushing for the closure of the base since 2005.

In June, however, the U.S. and Kyrgyzstan reached a new agreement through which the American military will continue to use the base in exchange for a threefold increase in annual rent, as well as some $50 million in grants to the government.

Bakiev “played the Russians, then he played us,” said Alexander Cooley, professor of political science at Barnard and a faculty member at the Harriman Institute, in The New York Times. “It’s all about getting as much as they can.”

Bakiev went up for reelection on July 23 even as Freedom House, a U.S.-based human rights organization, recently declared Kyrgyzstan a “consolidated authoritarian state.”

A preliminary assessment of the election, which Bakiev won in a landslide, was released on July 24 by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. While noting “some positive elements,” the assessment concluded that the election had been “marred by many problems and irregularities, including ballot box stuffing, inaccuracies in the voter lists, and multiple voting.”

“There was no real doubt as to who the winner would be,” Cooley said in a recent interview. “Newly equipped with foreign policy successes and revenues from the base agreement, Bakiev had the ability to make social payments to constituents. The opposition was divided and led by Almaz Atambaev of the Social Democrats, who is not charismatic and lacks broad support.”

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