BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — The front-runner in Kyrgyz stan’s presidential election looked set for an unexpectedly crushing victory early today, prompting accusations of fraud in a vote that was supposed to put the country on a firmer footing after an uprising last year overthrew the government.
With 88 percent of precincts counted, businessman and former Prime Minister Almazbek Atambayev was leading the field with 63 percent of the vote in the former Soviet Central Asian nation. The winner has to get at least 50 percent of the ballots cast to claim victory in one round. A runoff had been widely anticipated.
Kyrgyzstan, an impoverished and mainly Muslim nation of about 5 million people on China’s western fringes, is home to U.S. and Russian military air bases, making its fortunes the subject of lively international interest.
It remains to be seen whether the defeated candidates will pursue their complaints through legal channels or summon supporters to the streets. The specter of protests could cause anxiety in a country still unstable because of the political and ethnic violence of recent years.
The Kyrgyz overthrew authoritarian President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in April 2010 amid anger over corruption and stagnating living standards. Sunday’s election had been touted as the culmination of a movement for political reform away from the strong authoritarian model that has prevailed in the country since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Over the past two decades, elections had been purely formal exercises designed to lend a threadbare veil of legitimacy to the ruling elite. Kyrgyzstan last year adopted a new constitution that saw the powers of the presidency watered down in favor of a more powerful parliament.
Many had hoped this election would be the first peaceful transition of power in the nation’s history. The two presidents who ruled the country over the first two decades of its independence, Bakiyev and Askar Akayev, were both unseated in public uprisings.
