Washington Times, 13 September 2018
After quotes of a young Kabuli unemployed who says “I will not participate in the upcoming election as my vote will not be counted. I do not believe anymore that it will be a transparent election. Only rich guys who collude with Afghanistan’s independent election commission can win the election. So it is just a show to fool the citizens. There is no security, no stable economy, no reliable leader and no hope”, AAN’s Thomas Ruttig is quoted with some analysis:
The delay [of over three years of the elections] shows insufficient institutional capacity to apply the constitution and to hold elections on time, said Thomas Ruttig, a co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research organization based in Kabul and Berlin.
Afghan institutions “are often very dysfunctional, and Afghan democracy is more a facade than reality,” he said. “And at the moment, there are no conditions to have a halfway fair election in Afghanistan — and that undermines institutions and the belief of people in [the democratic process] even further. (…)
There is also a widespread tiredness — not of democracy, but of this kind of democracy where you have elections and in the end you never know whether your vote really has counted,” Mr. Ruttig said. (…)
Mr. Ruttig said it took more than eight months to get final results from the last parliamentary election and [if this is repeated] there is a chance that the full results from polling next month might not be published before the April election.
Revisions:
This article was last updated on 9 Mar 2020
