Comments on: Treading water

By: Guest

Guest — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:11:51 +0000

Fingers crossed for the outfall from the election.

By: Guest

Guest — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:10:42 +0000

Another nice distracting read, but you fell into the trap that most of the western media fell into. The results here are reported as a % of a list, not a % of the votes cast. So Ata-jurt got 8.8% of the combined list of the original voter list + the 200,000 or so who were added on the day. So if the turnout was around 56%, ata-jurt got a bit less than 20% of the votes cast, and the top 5 parties together got nearly 70% of the votes cast. Just another absurdity of the country. The 5% and the 0.5% are based on the same combined list – which is why Bhutan KR have a strong argument – since the 200,000 includes a lot of people who are also on the original list but names were spelt incorrectly or they are now living in a different place (or indeed do not really exist since they were just added to create votes for parties that controlled the local apparatus, using the ’roundabout’ method)

The election observers ‘free and fair’ is just political. None of the observers can do anything about ’roundabout’ voting when parties and election stations collude in not checking documents for people to be added to a new list or even be marked against the old list where the locals know the ‘person’ on the list is no longer in the area.

On GDP, it has to go negative to the end of the year. No politician wants it positive. They want things to look bad so the donors cough up the money and the lower GDP is this year, the easier it is to demonstrate improvement in coming years.

By: Guest

Guest — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:09:18 +0000

Hi Ian,
It does seem that Kyrtyzstan has gone in off the deep end.
Multiparty government is usually one of inaction. I am not at all convinced that ‘democracy’ is the best form of government for a resource-poor developing nation like Kyrgyzstan…or Nepal! They need a benevolent dictator (like Singapore). So…there’s a job for you!

By: Guest

Guest — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:08:43 +0000

Thanks for the link to the article on the elections in Talas. I thought that your treading water image is a good one to encapsulate the current situation. Who would have thought that anyone at all would invite the fox back into the hen house, much less the hens themselves??