#152: Watching Russia

Despite the peak of pre-election campaigning and the voting day in 5 days, Kyrgyzstan is closely watching the breaking news from Russia. Putin's backing of Dmitri Medvedev as his heir put an end to various speculations. Today's news also ends the debate on how Putin stays in power after March 2008. Medvedev, as a return of favor, also asked Putin to be the Prime Minister, with extended powers to control the entire security forces.

As for Medvedev's background, I amazed to learned that he is a big fan of Black Sabbath (remember Ozzy Osborn?). He is seen as a liberal politician without confrontational intentions towards the West, although he already made a Putinesque statement regarding the rise of Russia. Putin's protégé was involved in several big economic deals. After all he is not as white and fuzzy as we have known him so far.

This news is important to Kyrgyzstan because mainly Putin is very popular in Kyrgyzstan and many wish that we had a president like Putin, as a result President Bakiev tends to imitate his Russian counterpart. For example, since coming to power in March 2005 Bakiev has been cultivating the image of a boxer similar to Putin's image of a judo master, although Putin can parade sports credientials of owning a black belt.

Russia is also important because of Kyrgyz immigrant workers numbering from 300 000 on a conservative count to 1 millions on a liberal count. These are mainly voting age people. They left their children with relatives, mainly grandparents, in Kyrgyzstan. Despite this, the Central Elections Commission is sending only 29,000 ballot papers to Russia. Moreover, the CEC is installing voting booths in bazaars as if they expect difficulties of using all the ballot papers.

The World Bank also issued a report claiming that immigrants in 2007 send approximately $1billiob, which is around 27.4% of our GDP. By contract, the 2004 figure was around 8% of GDP.