| I believe they call this "The Carter Plat du Jour"... |
KAZAKH president Nursultan Nazarbayev's party won every seat in a new parliament yesterday after a flawed vote that the opposition said turned the clock back to Soviet rule. The 88.05 per cent margin of victory for Mr Nazarbayev's Nur Otan party in Saturday's vote came in a poll that did not meet international standards, election monitors said. Six other parties in the poll failed to reach a seven per cent hurdle required to enter the lower house, including the main opposition All-National Social Democratic Party (ANSDP) which received 4.62 per cent of the vote. "As an experienced observer I can tell you I have never seen a democratic country with one political party in parliament," Lubomir Kopaj, of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, told a news conference.
Bolat Abilov, one of the ANSDP's leaders, said: "This is absolutely absurd. We're going back to the Soviet Union, back to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."
OSCE monitors recorded incidents of votes for other parties being counted for Nur Otan, a failure to let observers see ballot papers or move freely during the count, and a failure to comply with correct counting procedures.
