On June 9, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov signed the law on amendments to the procedures on electing members of parliament. There are some positive and some controversial changes, one of the most significant of which is the diminished role for political parties.

Structurally, the new legislation creates 30 electoral districts in Kyrgyzstan. Each district will elect three parliamentary deputies, with the three candidates receiving the most votes becoming the deputies from their district.

Currently, there are 90 seats in Kyrgyzstan’s parliament. That number will remain.

According to the new law, one of the three candidates from each territorial constituency must be a woman. Kyrgyzstan has had a gender quota rule in place since 2007 whereby at least 30% of the members of parliament should be women. However, in reality that percentage has never been reached. Currently, only 20 of the 90 of the deputies in Kyrgyzstan’s parliament are women. Under the new legislation, a minimum 33% quota for women is guaranteed.

Another change dispenses with by-elections in the event an elected deputy steps down from their post. If a seat is vacated, the candidate from that district who received the fourth most votes in elections will receive the empty seat. If the deputy vacating their seat is a woman, the female candidate who received the next highest number of votes in that electoral district will fill the seat.

MP Ulan Primov, one of the authors of the amendments, said Kyrgyzstan has spent nearly 200 million som (about $2.29 million) on by-elections since the 2021 parliamentary elections.

One of the most controversial changes is the decision to revert entirely to a single-mandate selection of candidates. Kyrgyzstan elected all its deputies via the single-mandate system in the 1995, 2000, and 2005 parliamentary elections. Parties also ran candidates, but in the 1995 elections, 67 of the 105 seats went to independents, in 2000, 73 of the 105 seats were won by independents, and in 2005, after changes to parliament’s structure, 47 of the 75 places in parliament went to independents.

In 2007, the system changed, and deputies were elected by party lists. This led to the first-ever ruling party in Kyrgyzstan’s history, the Ak Jol party of then-President Kurmanbek Bakiyev which took 71 of the 90 seats in parliament in the 2007 elections.

Parliament’s structure was changed to 120 seats in 2010. The parliamentary elections that year, and in 2015 and 2020 were conducted using party lists.

In the last parliamentary elections in November 2021, Kyrgyzstan had introduced a split system whereby 36 deputies were elected in single-mandate districts and the remaining 54 deputies by party lists.

In an interview with state media outlet Kabar in February 2025, President Japarov spoke about the coming changes to election legislation, saying, “Perhaps in 40-50 years, if our people and politicians are ready, we will move to a party system of government.”

It is a curious comment considering the other Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, all use party lists to elect deputies in their elections to the lower house of parliament (deputies to the upper houses, in Turkmenistan’s case the Halk Maslahaty, or People’s Council, are all chosen without popular votes).

Kyrgyzstan’s system leaves the country’s political parties in limbo, particularly opposition parties that generally have access to less funds than pro-government parties.

The new legislation allows political parties to forward candidates in single-mandate districts. However, political parties must pay up to  9 million som (about $103,000), as a non-refundable electoral deposit while independent candidates only pay 100,000 som (about $1,115).

Smaller parties could have a difficult time raising that amount of money. When parliament was debating the proposed amendments in March 2025, deputy Balbak Tulobayev said even raising 1 million som would be difficult for some parties.

Influential local community leaders and businessmen have the advantage of running as independents. Their local popularity and much lower electoral deposit leave them money for campaigning that should provide a significant guarantee of victory.

The amendments do not address the biggest problems that have plagued Kyrgyzstan’s elections: vote-buying and the use of administrative resources. There have been widespread allegations of both in all of Kyrgyzstan’s elections, parliamentary and presidential and were the reason for the March 2005 and October 2020 revolutions that followed parliamentary elections.

With the high electoral deposit for political parties, most of the deputies elected in the next elections (currently scheduled for 2026) will likely be independents. There have been accusations in the past that candidates backed by the president enjoyed greater coverage in state media and were able to more easily reserve the best venues for campaign rallies. There are also allegations of businesses pressuring employees to vote for state-backed candidates.

Such accusations seem unavoidable under this new electoral legislation.