Parliamentary Coalitions of the Kyrgyz Republic: Factors Behind Formation and Dissolution of the Coalitions

Abstract

The Constitution of the Kyrgyz Republic, which was adopted in June 2010 after the second Kyrgyz revolution, establishes a new institutional framework for the political system of Kyrgyzstan. According to the Constitution, the political party, which gets more than 50 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections (absolute majority), forms the government of the Kyrgyz Republic. Since none of the 29 competed political parties had won an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections in October 2010, five political parties (the nationalist Ata-Jurt, the Social Democratic Party, the centrist Ar-Namys, the liberal Respublika, and the socialist Ata-Meken), which overcame 5 percent national and 0.5 percent regional electoral threshold, became the first actors of parliamentary coalition building in Kyrgyzstan’s history. Since 2010, there have been five majority coalitions and four coalition governments. Frequent change of coalition governments within one convocation, which derives from an instability of the majority coalitions, characterizes a weak development of the coalition building. The paper tries to determine institutional factors, which lie behind formation and dissolution of the majority coalitions, and find casual links between these factors.