Oppn sidelined as Tajikistan votes in parliamentary polls

DUSHANBE: Ex-soviet republic Tajikistan on Sunday votes in parliamentary polls expected to be dominated by the ruling party of President Emomali Rakhmon, with only one genuinely critical party taking part and the former main opposition banned.

In a scenario familiar from the other former Soviet states of Central Asia -- with the exception of politically volatile Kyrgyzstan -- Rakhmon's People's Democratic Party of Tajikistan is expected to sweep the polls with almost no contest.

The elections will be the first in Tajikistan's post-soviet history without the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, a moderate faith-based party which was once the main opposition but was banned in 2015 and the target of a harsh crackdown ever since.

Other parties from the outgoing legislature which are competing -- the agrarian party, the party of economic reform, the socialist party, the communist party and the democratic party -- are all widely seen as proxies that endorse 67-year-old Rakhmon's nearly three-decade rule.

Only one identifiable opposition party will compete in Sunday's ballot -- the Social Democratic Party of Tajikistan, which has never entered parliament. The People's Democratic Party of Tajikistan currently dominates the chamber, holding 51 seats out of 63.

The last elections in 2015 marked a turning point for Tajikistan, a landlocked Muslim-majority country reliant on former overlord Russia for security and next-door China for loans and investment.

That year, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan failed to make parliament for the first time since the end of a five-year civil war that pit