KABUL — Their faces loom from thousands of gigantic posters strung across the Afghan capital. Some express hopes for youth-driven change, diversity and modernization; others make not-too-subtle appeals for loyalty to an older generation of warlords and ethnic strongmen.
More than 2,500 candidates are running for 249 seats in Afghanistan’s parliament in Saturday’s elections, despite campaign violence that has killed 10 candidates and scores of supporters, Taliban threats to sabotage the polls, accusations of pre-election rigging, and public cynicism after years of legislative vote-buying and obstructionism.
The risks are many, but so are the opportunities, whether to champion reforms or profit from wheeling and dealing. Many candidates have curtailed public events after half a dozen deadly attacks this month, and hundreds of polling places in high-risk districts will not open at all. The campaign, however, is in full swing.
“Please vote! Vote for a clean and modern parliament. Vote to get rid of the mafia. People who buy your vote will sell it later.”
That is the message that Abdul Manan Shiwaisharq, a rumpled academic in his 40s, was repeating into a microphone, between recorded snatches of an old political chant, as he drove through Kabul one recent afternoon in an old Toyota Corolla sedan with a loudspeaker roped to the trunk.
Shiwaisharq stopped at a traffic circle teeming with jobless laborers, got out and started chatting. One grizzled well digger challenged him, saying that all politicians were corrupt and indifferent to the plight of the poor.
“If we vote for you, you will forget your promises and never answer our calls,” the well digger charged.
“I promise, I will answer your calls,” the candidate vowed.
A few miles away, inside a chandelier-lit wedding hall surrounded by armed guards, Baqir Mohaqiq, a clean-cut candidate of 26, described his agenda to promote government reform and social justice. But his speech to several hundred supporters also included a strident appeal to ethnic grievances. He vowed to “defend the rights of my people like a soldier” and was greeted by shouts of “God is great!”
In the streets, hundreds of posters for Mohaqiq left no doubt about who and what he represented. His portrait was flanked by smaller likenesses of two war-hardened elders — his father, Mohammad, a powerful boss of Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazara minority; and Abdul Ali Mazari, a legendary Hazara fighter killed by the Taliban in 1995.
Although election officials barred candidates with ties to armed militias or criminal groups, nearly two dozen sons and other relatives of ex-warlords are on ballots and billboards across the country. This effort to put fresh faces on a tarnished past has aroused a mix of derision and fear among voters, and human rights activists said several campaign attacks were probably the work of rival politicians rather than insurgents.
“We are seeing attacks not only on the lives of candidates but on the life of Afghan democracy,” said Mohammad Yousuf Rasheed, executive director of the independent Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan. “This is not all the Taliban’s doing. There are competing interests and clashes over seats. There are efforts to force candidates to withdraw. What will happen on election day if voters get directly targeted?”
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