Kyrgyzstan goes to polls for parliamentary vote
Voting will conclude at 1400 GMT with the composition of the new parliament.
BISHKEK (AFP) - Ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan headed to the polls on Sunday for a hotly-contested parliamentary vote, but the results are unlikely to change the country s firmly pro-Russian trajectory.
Polling stations across the majority-Muslim Central Asian country of six million opened at 0200 GMT, the election commission said, as 14 parties and more than 2,000 candidates battle for seats in the 120-member legislature.
The Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan, affiliated to current President Almazbek Atambayev, is expected to do well in the poll, but can only take a maximum of 65 seats due to a stipulation in the country s constitution.
Other parties tipped for strong showings include Ata-Meken, Bir Bol and Respublika-Ata-Jurt, all of whom feature former prime ministers on their party lists and are openly loyal to Moscow.
Voting will conclude at 1400 GMT with the composition of the new parliament expected to be known shortly thereafter.
Occasionally referred to as an "island of democracy" in authoritarian Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan has the region s freest press and civil society and once hosted US and Russian military bases simultaneously.
But the lease on Washington s Afghanistan-linked Transit Center was not renewed when it expired in 2014, and relations have grown tense after Kyrgyzstan terminated a bilateral cooperation accord dating back to 1993 this summer.
That decision, which allowed for the provision of tens of millions of dollars of US assistance to the country annually, came after the US State Department awarded a prestigious human rights prize to an ethnic minority activist jailed in 2010.
Atambayev described the award as an "intentional provocation" over five years after a bloody revolution and ethnic violence in the republic left hundreds dead.
Sunday s election is the first time citizens of Kyrgyzstan have been required to submit biometric data to cast votes, fuelling fears of teething problems at polling stations grappling with the new technology.
The new government measure has effectively sidelined hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz migrants working in Russia and other citizens who failed to meet the September 19 deadline for submitting their data.
