Ashgabat – Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has secured a third term in office by winning a widely-expected landslide in Sunday’s election, preliminary results showed on Monday.
Berdymukhamedov won 97.69 per cent of the vote with a turnout of 97.27 per cent, the Central Election Commission said.
Berdymukhamedov, 59, has run the former Soviet republic of five million people with an iron fist for a decade after succeeding equally autocratic president-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in 2006.
Eight other candidates ran in the Sunday vote, all of them public servants, managers of state-owned companies or nominees of political parties completely loyal to the government.
In 2016, Turkmenistan amended its constitution in a way that could allow Berdymukhamedov to stay in power indefinitely, removing the 70-year age limit for presidential candidates and extending the presidential term to seven years from five.
NAN Ashgabat, the capital of energy-rich Turkmenistan, has been recognized by Guinness World Records as having the world’s highest density of buildings made from white marble.
The city boasts 543 new buildings clad with white marble, covering a total area of 4.5 million square meters. The Guinness website says that if the “marble was laid out flat, there would be one square meter of marble for every 4.87 square meters of land.”
Berdymukhammedov was also honored by the Turkmen parliament on May 25 with the honorary title of “Distinguished Architect of Turkmenistan” for his “titanic efforts put into the political, economic, and cultural development of our beloved Motherland.”
Meanwhile, according to a new report by Amnesty International, Turkmen citizens are deprived of basic human rights such as freedom of movement and freedom of the press, while the political opposition is routinely harassed, political freedom is limited, and elections are anything but free and fair.
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