Taking the International Community for a Ride: Tajikistan’s 2013 Virtual Presidential Election

December 10, 2013

Payam Foroughi, PhD, University of Utah

Abstract: Tajikistan held its presidential election on 6 November 2013, as a result of which the incumbent, President Emomali Rahmon, was elected to another seven-year term, thus potentially guaranteeing himself as leader of the Republic for a total of 28 years, come 2020. Tajikistan’s national elections, both presidential and parliamentary, have been characterized by lack of transparency, fraud, harassment of opposition and a pre-election atmosphere of near-total lack of political pluralism. Likewise, the 2013 election failed to provide a forum for real opposition groups, namely the Islamic Renaissance Party and the Social Democratic Party, to be able to freely campaign, have access to state media and recruit new members in outlying areas without harassment and obstacles set up by state administrative and security apparatuses. Despite strong indications that the 2013 election was to be another manipulated and fraudulent event, the international community, namely the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) via its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODHIR), monitored it by sending a team of 300 short- and long-term observers. And though the OSCE-ODHIR’s preliminary post-election report stated that Tajikistan’s 2013 November presidential election was mired with “lack of genuine choice and meaningful pluralism,” the organization primarily focused on the formalities of election and election day observations, and failed to recognize the overall virtual nature of the country’s electoral process and its lack of correspondence with international standards of democracy. The presentation recounted and dissected the dynamics of the 2013 presidential election of Tajikistan, and presented reasons behind the OSCE-ODIHR’s monitoring of the said event despite its forgone fraudulent nature. Among other things, the presentation relied on a number of academic works, including Levitsky and Way (2002), Wilson (2005) and Mukhtarova (2013).

Bio: Payam Foroughi is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek and a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, USA. He has worked with a series of organizations in Tajikistan, including the OSCE and consultancies with Oxfam, the U.N., the EIU and Freedom House.

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