Kazakh political parties to merge

ASTANA. November 10th - Kazakhstan's president announced Friday the merger of the ruling Otan party with the pro-government Civic Party in what the opposition described as part of efforts to ensure his grip on power in upcoming parliamentary elections.

The Civic Party has about 150,000 members, mostly workers of large plants and mines in the country's heavily industrialized central regions. After the merger Otan will have approximately one million members, becoming the largest political party in the ex-Soviet state with a population of 16 million.

"The merger of the two leading parties will stimulate political consolidation in the country," President Nursultan Nazarbayev said at the Civic Party congress in the Kazakh capital, Astana.

In July, another party, Asar, headed by Nazarbayev's elder daughter, Dariga, merged with Otan.
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"The authorities wanted to create a super party that would have a decisive number of seats in Parliament in any political situation," Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, head of the opposition Social Democrats, told The Associated Press.

Tuyakbai, a former parliament speaker, had challenged Nazarbayev in a presidential election last December which Western observers said was flawed.

"The authorities are building what they think is a right political configuration," opposition activist Petr Svoik told the AP. "They want to have two ruling parties and the Social Democratic party as their opposition."

The recent killings of two prominent Nazarbayev critics highlighted persistent doubts about the transparency of Kazakhstan's political system.

Opposition groups said the killings were politically motivated; authorities ruled one death from multiple gunshot wounds was a suicide and the other was a murder motivated by personal enmity.

Nazarbayev, a former Communist boss, has drawn criticism in recent years for attempts to tighten control. Nevertheless, he is credited for making Kazakhstan one of the leading former Soviet economies that has drawn vast foreign investment to develop its Caspian Sea oil resources.