Last year, Kyrgyzstan experienced the third big protests in 15 years which resulted with the change of power. After the removal of presidents in the Tulip Revolution in 2005, and the Melon Revolution in 2010, the new protests erupted over the fraud in the October 2020 parliamentary election. Protesters occupied the office of the president and the building of the parliament and released the former president Atambayev from prison. The Central Electoral Commission annulled the elections. President Jêênbekov could not stop these actions and resigned after being less than three years in office.
These events were not unusual in Kyrgyzstan, but they are in the rest of Central Asia. Countries there are autocracies in which only parties sanctioned by the regime could exist. There are no free elections, free media and the mechanism of checks and balances. Enormous political power is concentrated in the hands of one man – the president. Although in the last thirty years there have been occasional protests there as well, they have often been bloodily suppressed by the repressive apparatus and, ultimately, unsuccessful.
Canadian political scientist Lucan Way calls political regimes like Kyrgyzstan ‘pluralism by default’. They originate from the existence of multiple sources of power in the country, which disable its strong concentration in one center and make the existence of a harsh authoritarian regime not likely. Way claims that pluralism by default could be a democratic, a competitive authoritarian or a soft authoritarian regime. A number of institutional, social and structural pre-conditions decisively contributed to the existence of this kind of pluralism in Kyrgyzstan as a competitive authoritarian regime. First, since 2005 the country has experienced more frequent change of power than some Western countries have had. While Angela Merkel is still German Chancellor after being 16 years in office, in this period Kyrgyzstan has changed six presidents. Second, presidential powers decreased over time, specifically with the 2010 constitution which sharply cut them making Kyrgyz President weaker than many European presidents currently are. With this constitution, Kyrgyzstan moved from a semi-presidential system to a parliamentary system in which the prime minister was the head of executive.
Protests were not the only source of the change of power in this Central Asian country. Parliamentary elections in the last 15 years have produced rotation of political parties in the government and have made these elections the ones of the first order. Their role in the government and party system formation was more similar to those that exist in the European countries than to the role of elections in the rest of the region. Since 2010, this role was assisted with one unusual constitutional provision: no party in the 120-seat Parliament could hold more than 65 seats. This fostered the development of a multi-party system and prevented the dominance of one party, as it is the case with other countries in the region. In Turkmenistan there was only one party until 2012 and since then two more were founded. In Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan number of parties is higher, but even there the biggest party in parliament is not the ruling party – it is just the biggest. Political power there does not depend on the parliamentary majority, but on the will of the president who forms governments and designates prime minister. In contrast to them, parliamentary majority in Kyrgyzstan had a chance to form most governments in this period.
Besides competitive elections and multi-party system, informal division of the country into two parts contributed to the existence of political pluralism as well. The political elites in the northern and southern regions are mutually opposed and enjoy some power independently from the central state institutions in the capital Bishkek. This division is not only a contemporary phenomenon since it existed even in the Soviet times, but autocratic Communist regime controlled it and did not allow too much dispersion that could endanger the monolith Soviet power. In the contemporary period, this division has become less controllable due to the lack of a powerful organization like the Communist Party.
However, after the last year protests, the pluralism by default in the form it had existed in the last decade came to an end. New president Japarov, who was elected on January 10, arguably tries to change situation in the country building-up his powers. Simultaneously with presidential election, on the referendum the voters chose between the two options – the presidential and the parliamentary system of government. The first option prevailed and only three months later, in April, the new constitution with the presidential system was put on the second referendum. Voters voted for it as well and thus removed parliamentary system of government after ten years of existence. This move could bring more stability to the political system, but it also brings more unchecked power to the president who is directly elected, not politically responsible to the Parliament, and from now solely controls the government. Since powerful presidents in Central Asia so far have not brought anything good for the democratization of their countries, we can expect that Kyrgyzstan is also not going to get democracy with this constitution and political practice, but only a new form of authoritarian regime which is somewhere between harsh autocracies in the region and democracies in the West.
Pluralism by default in Kyrgyzstan is like the two-faced Janus, the god of beginnings and ends, transience, change and duality. In the last ten years, a parliamentary system of government and a real multi-party system suppressed the excessive concentration of political power in one institution or a person. It was a change from previous authoritarian regimes and supposed to be a beginning of the new democratization. In the end, it seems that it was only a passage from one authoritarian regime toward the other. Its failure was that it sometimes contributed to the instability of the regime and the state – the free elections were not always fair, resulting with protests and otherwise expressed dissatisfaction, there were frequent changes of governments, and all relevant parties and actors were not committed to the democratization of the country. But the termination of the parliamentary system of government for the sake of the stability in the country is a risky decision. Whatever the quality and performance of the system were, it was truly one of the pillars of rights and freedoms that do not exist in the rest of Central Asia. Some politicians in opposition raised their voice against the introduction of the presidential system. It is also questionable how much confidence Kyrgyz citizens have in this reform since the voter turnout in both referenda was lower than 40%. This gives the new regime a dubious legitimacy that could produce a new dissatisfaction and its fall until social, political and economic changes eventually alter the situation. In Kyrgyzstan, “pluralism by default” is in fact “instability by default”.
