Tightening the Grip

AKIpress reported that Central Election Committee (CEC) gave three day period for parties to register. According to their press release, it starts on the day when elections were announced.

However, President has set the election date for December 16, 2007 yesterday (October 23). Maybe I am missing out some legal nuances here, but as far as I understand parties have only 2 days left, considering the fact that today is over.

As I was saying before, many were critical of the short term for the Referendum- one month. However, despite of all the criticism, it has passed with inflated turnout numbers and ballot stuffing, which was followed by immediate dissolution of the current Parliament. CEC has not even announced the referendum results, when our parliamentarians filled the rows of unemployed.

Seems like President decided to crackdown on the opposition completely, cutting off possible ways to consolidate, since it was in a rather disbursed state after escalated clashes with government for the past year.

There was a lot of reshuffling among parties since new electoral system was introduced so abruptly, on an extremely short notice. Thus a lot of parties, who are by default weak in Kyrgyzstan, are gathering people for their lists with one hand, while the other hand is writing the charter and programs.

Ata Meken- one of the main opposition parties announced that they are going to unite with Ak Shumkar- another leading parties in opposition bloc. Seems like they won't have much time to discuss the terms of unification, if only 2 days is enough for them.

President is rather quickly and very surely tightening the grip.