Ankara: Tajikistan held general elections on Sunday to elect members of parliament and local councils, with more than 5.5 million registered voters eligible to cast their ballots across 3,513 polling stations nationwide. The elections will determine the composition of the lower house of parliament, the House of Representatives, as well as provincial and district municipal councils.
According to Anadolu Agency, Tajikistan’s Central Election and Referendum Commission stated that the voting process, which started at 6 a.m. local time (0100GMT) for the election of members of the lower house of parliament, ended at 8 p.m. No complaints of election violations have been reported, and the first unofficial results of the election are expected to be announced on Monday.
A total of 220 candidates from six political parties are competing for 63 parliamentary seats under a mixed electoral system. Of these, 22 seats will be filled through proportional representation, while the remaining 41 will be decided through a majoritarian system. For Tajik citizens living abroad, 36 polling stations have been set up at diplomatic missions in 28 foreign countries.
More than 200 international observers from organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Commonwealth of Independent States are monitoring the elections. Additionally, Ahmet Yener, the chairman of Trkiye’s Supreme Election Council, is in Tajikistan with other council members to observe the voting process. However, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is notably absent, as the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights announced last month that ‘the absence of accreditation guarantees for international OSCE observers’ had forced the organization to cancel its monitoring mission.
In the last parliamentary elections held in March 2020, the ruling People’s Democratic Party secured 47 out of 63 seats in the House of Representatives. The Agrarian Party won seven seats, the Party of Economic Reforms five, the Communist Party two, while the Socialist Party and Democratic Party each gained one seat after surpassing the 5% electoral threshold.