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Kyrgyzstan
Political Parties
The period immediately preceding and following independence saw
a proliferation of political groups of various sizes and platforms.
Although President Akayev emerged from the strongest of those
groups, in the early 1990s no organized party system developed
either around Akayev or in opposition to him.
Communist Parties
The Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan (CPK), which was the only legal
political party during the Soviet years, was abolished in 1991
in the aftermath of the failed coup against the Gorbachev government
of the Soviet Union. A successor, the Kyrgyzstan Communist Party,
was allowed to register in September 1992. It elected two deputies
to the lower house of parliament in 1995. In that party, significant
oppositionists include past republic leader Absamat Masaliyev,
a former first secretary of the CPK. The 1995 election also gave
a deputy's mandate to T. Usubaliyev, who had been head of the
CPK and leader of the republic between 1964 and 1982. Another
party with many former communist officials is the Republican People's
Party. Two other, smaller neocommunist parties are the Social
Democrats of Kyrgyzstan, which gained three seats in the upper
house and eight seats in the lower house of the 1995 parliament,
and the People's Party of Kyrgyzstan, which holds three seats
in the lower house.
Other Parties
All of the other parties in existence in 1995 began as unsanctioned
civic movements. The first is Ashar (Help), which was founded
in 1989 as a movement to take over unused land for housing; Ashar
took one seat in the upper house in the 1995 elections. A fluctuating
number of parties and groups are joined under the umbrella of
the Democratic Movement of Kyrgyzstan (DDK); the most influential
is Erkin Kyrgyzstan (Freedom for Kyrgyzstan), which in late 1992
split into two parties, one retaining the name Erkin Kyrgyzstan,
and the other called Ata-meken (Fatherland). In the 1995 elections,
Erkin Kyrgyzstan took one seat and Ata-meken two seats in the
upper house. In the spring of 1995, the head of Erkin Kyrgyzstan
was indicted for embezzling funds from the university of which
he is a rector; it is unclear whether or not this accusation was
politically motivated.
Another democratically inclined party, Asaba (Banner) also took
one seat in the upper house. Registration was denied to another
group, the Freedom Party, because its platform includes the creation
of an Uygur autonomous district extending into the Chinese Xinjiang
Uygur Autonomous Region, which the Chinese government opposes.
The Union of Germans took one seat in the lower house, and a Russian
nationalist group, Concord, also took one seat.
For all their proliferation, parties have not yet played a large
part in independent Kyrgyzstan. In the mid-1990s, early enthusiasm
for the democratic parties faded as the republic's economy grew
worse and party officials were implicated in the republic's proliferating
political corruption. The communist successor parties, on the
other hand, appeared to gain influence in this period. In the
absence of elections, and with President Akayev belonging to no
party, it is difficult to predict the future significance of any
of these parties.
Data as of March 1996
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