[Pak Daily Times] Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmon won a crushing victory in presidential elections to secure a fourth term at the helm of the poorest state in the former Soviet Union, the election commission said on Thursday.Rakhmon won 83.6 percent in Wednesday's elections against five also-ran candidates, full results showed, an improvement even on his showing in the 2006 polls when he won 79.3 percent.
"The respected Emomali Rakhmon is re-elected president of the Republic of Tajikistan," election commission chief Shermukhammad Shokhiyon told news hounds in Dushanbe. With the presidential mandate now seven years, he is due to stay in power until 2020.
Rakhmon's nearest rival, Communist Party candidate Ismoil Talbakov, won just five percent of the vote. Turnout was an equally overwhelming 86.6 percent of voters, the election commission said.
The president -- who first came to power amid the chaos of the start of Tajikistan's civil war in 1992 -- now faces the task of coming good on election promises to lift the country bordering Afghanistan out of poverty and end its dire energy shortages.
In a tale all too familiar throughout Moslem but vehemently secular ex-Soviet Central Asia, the five candidates standing against Rakhmon were virtual unknowns even inside the country, each with next to no chance of victory.
Rakhmon's most significant potential rival, female rights lawyer Oinikhol Bobonazarova of the moderate opposition Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan, was unable to stand after narrowly failing to muster the signatures required to register her candidacy.
Bobonazarova gathered only 202,000 of the 210,000 signatures required that equates to five percent of the electorate.
Another main opposition party, the Social Democratic Party, said it boycotted the elections because of "a lack of democracy and transparency".