POLITICS

Azhdar KURTOV

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Azhdar Kurtov, President, Moscow Public Law Research Center (Moscow, Russia)

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In his New Year Address to the Nation, Turkmenistan President Niyazov named a 20 percent increase in the country’s GDP and an increase in its population by 300,000 as the republic’s main goals for the year 2005.

The year was ushered in by a presidential decree which increased wages and salaries paid from the budget by 50 percent. The president criticized the state of affairs in agriculture and, according to the recently established tradition, found and punished the culprits. Two deputy premiers—Atamyradov responsible for agriculture and Redzhepdurdy Ataev accused of financial irregularities connected with housing construction carried out by foreign contractors—lost their jobs. The latter had allegedly overpriced the job to be done and overpaid $4.5m of budget money. This time again though, the president’s authoritarian methods of frequently replacing bureaucrats did nothing to uproot the negative phenomena in governance.

On 9 January, seven constituencies came to the polls once more to elect Mejlis (parliament) deputies: earlier, on 19 December, 2004, national election day, the authorities, for the first time during the years of independence, departed from the well-oiled voting mechanism. While in the 1990s, election campaigns were mostly organized according to the Soviet pattern with one (carefully selected) candidate running for one seat, on 19 December, 2004, competitive elections in seven constituencies failed to reveal the winners, which made new elections necessary. According to the Central Election Commission, 72.24 percent of the total population came to the polls nationwide; the results were………………..

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