Eurasian Chessboard: Kyrgyzstan

Filed 21 July 2010 — Analysis

On 3 July a career diplomat was sworn in as president of Kyrgyzstan before more than a thousand people in a Soviet-era concert hall in Bishkek. She is the first woman to lead a Central Asian state and the first to lead any state of the Commonwealth of Independent States. She took the oath to run a country that had, the previous weekend, voted overwhelmingly to reduce the office she was assuming.

That paradox is the whole story of the Kyrgyz transition, and it is why this small mountain republic is worth more attention than its population or its economy would normally command.

From presidential to parliamentary

The new constitution, endorsed by more than ninety per cent of those voting, converts Kyrgyzstan from a presidential republic into a parliamentary one. The 120-seat legislature will appoint the prime minister and the government. The president holds the office for a transitional period ending on 31 December 2011 and heads the administration only until a cabinet emerges from the elections due in October.

No other state in the region has attempted this. Central Asia's post-Soviet norm has been the strong presidency, frequently extended by referendum, in which parliament ratifies rather than decides. Kyrgyzstan is proposing to invert that arrangement in the middle of an emergency — which is either the boldest constitutional experiment in the region or an invitation to permanent instability, and reasonable analysts disagree about which.

Why the presidency was worth dismantling

The case for the change is written in the country's own recent history. Twice in five years a Kyrgyz president has been removed by street protest rather than by ballot: once in 2005, and again in April of this year, when demonstrations forced out the incumbent and installed the interim administration that has now been formalised.

Both removals followed the same trajectory. A president consolidates control over the security apparatus, the broadcast media and the licensing of major businesses; the constitutional mechanisms for replacing him atrophy; and when discontent finally arrives it has nowhere institutional to go, so it goes into the square. Diffusing power across a parliament is an attempt to give that discontent somewhere else to go.

The case against

The objection is straightforward and was made loudly by Kyrgyzstan's neighbours. A parliamentary system in a country with weak parties, regional patronage networks and an armed and disorderly south may produce nothing but shifting coalitions and paralysis — and June's violence in Osh and Jalalabad was cited as evidence that the state needed more central authority, not less.

The counter-observation is that the June violence occurred under a vacuum of authority, not under a parliamentary system, and that the interim government's inability to control the south was a symptom of the collapse it inherited rather than of the constitution it was proposing.

The external board

Kyrgyzstan matters to more powers than its size suggests. Russia treats Central Asia as a security perimeter and maintains a military presence in the country. The United States has used a Kyrgyz airfield as a transit point for operations in Afghanistan. China borders the country and buys its way in through infrastructure and trade rather than bases. All three watched the April change of government closely; none of them intervened decisively, which is itself informative about how much any of them was prepared to spend on the outcome.

What to watch next

The October parliamentary elections are the test. If they produce a workable coalition and a government that survives its first year, the parliamentary model acquires a precedent that other states in the region will have to explain away. If they produce deadlock, the argument for a strong presidency writes itself. Regional election observation is conducted by the OSCE, and the political background is tracked in the Central Asia coverage of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.