Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon on October 25, 2024 in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
Shortly after Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny lost his mayoral bid to incumbent and Kremlin favorite Sergei Sobyanin on Sunday, a presidential race in Tajikistan is shaping up to be more of the same: an ill-fated candidacy in a repressive political climate.
On Tuesday, a Tajik opposition coalition announced that Oinikhol Bobonazarova, best known for her human rights advocacy and brief imprisonment in 1993 as a “state traitor,” would be its sole candidate to face off against strongman president Imomali Rakhmon in the November 6 election.
Bobonazarova faces a formidable opponent in Rakhmon, who has been in power for over two decades. Like his despotic counterpart in Uzbekistan — where President Islam Karimov has been in office since 1991 — Rakhmon rules with a heavy hand, jailing or exiling opposition leaders and clamping down on independent media. (Case in point: in 2012, Facebook and other social media were shut down until a government organization could be created to monitor the sites for insults to political leaders.) The result: endemic voter apathy and a handicapped opposition. Rakhmon has also seen to his own political longevity — and possible entrance to the 10,000 Days Dictator Club — by introducing constitutional amendments to increase the duration and number of presidential terms.
In the lead-up to November elections, Bobonazarova’s team will need to gather signatures from 5% of Tajik voters (some 450,000) in order to legally register her candidacy. Even if Bobonazarova makes it onto the ballot — and survives the inevitable mud slinging from state-controlled media — Rakhmon’s victory is a foregone conclusion: the president won his last election in 2007 with a large majority (79.3%) amid cries of vote-rigging and voter intimidation.
More daunting still for the opposition may be Rakhmon’s not-so-secret weapon: tacit approval for his regime from the United States and Russia (among others). Like the Uzbek president, Rakhmon has been forgiven all manner of sins as a result of Tajikistan’s strategic location in Central Asia — a position that will only strengthen as the 2014 NATO pullout from Afghanistan rocks regional stability. Both the U.S. and Russia hope to maintain military bases in Tajikistan for the foreseeable future. Ironically, the president has warned his opponents not to “rely on their foreign patrons.” (For more irony, see: Tajikistan independence tree ‘dies in Dushanbe’.)
Nonetheless, here, as in the Navalny race, the import may not lie in the winner but rather in the strengthening of the opposition. Bobonazarova’s candidacy marks a rare alliance between the Islamic Rebirth Party (IRP) — Tajikistan’s largest opposition group with a reported 40,000 members — and the Social Democrat party under the umbrella of the Union of Reformist Forces of Tajikistan (URFT). After twenty years of political oppression, amid palpable public disillusionment, the growing entente between Tajikistan’s secular and Islamist parties may prove to be the start of the long, hard chore of dismantling the Rakhmon behemoth.
