Tajik strongman re-elected with 83.6% of vote

Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmon won a crushing victory in presidential elections to secure a fourth term at the helm of the poorest state in the former Soviet Union, the election commission said today.

 

Rakhmon won 83.6 % in yesterday's elections against five also-ran candidates, full results showed, an improvement even on his showing in the 2006 polls when he won 79.3 %.

 

"The respected Emomali Rakhmon is re-elected president of the Republic of Tajikistan," election commission chief Shermukhammad Shokhiyon told reporters in Dushanbe. With the presidential mandate now seven years, he is due to stay in power until 2020.

 

Rakhmon's nearest rival, Communist Party candidate Ismoil Talbakov, won just 5% of the vote. Turnout was an equally overwhelming 86.6 % of voters, the election commission said.

 

The president - who first came to power amid the chaos of the start of Tajikistan's civil war in 1992 - now faces the task of coming good on election promises to lift the country bordering Afghanistan out of poverty and end its dire energy shortages.

 

In a tale all too familiar throughout Muslim but vehemently secular ex-Soviet Central Asia, the five candidates standing against Rakhmon were virtual unknowns even inside the country, each with next to no chance of victory.

 

Rakhmon's most significant potential rival, female rights lawyer Oinikhol Bobonazarova of the moderate opposition Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan, was unable to stand after narrowly failing to muster the signatures required to register her candidacy.

 

Bobonazarova gathered only 202,000 of the 210,000 signatures required that equates to five % of the electorate, a shortfall her party blamed on harassment from the local authorities.

 

Another main opposition party, the Social Democratic Party, said it boycotted the elections because of "a lack of democracy and transparency".

 

The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which is monitoring the polls, noted in its interim report that "there is no visible campaign by other candidates so far" and is due to give its final verdict later Thursday.

 

Shadowed by the more than 7,000-metre high peaks of the Pamir Mountains, Persian-speaking Tajikistan boasts a crucial strategic position, bordering China and Afghanistan, as well as ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.