Different Political and Ideological Preferences among Kyrgyzstani Youth as a Reason for Their Polarization during Political Crises

Abstract

After the parliamentary elections in October 2020 in Kyrgyzstan and the announcement of their results, people, which included mainly youth, went to a protest and demanded the annulment of the election results. Further, this initially peaceful protest rally developed into a physical clash of the protesters with the security forces, then, on October 9 between the protesters themselves. This was called the clash between "balkonskie" and "zhertamovskie", which is a rough division into urban and rural. In this thesis, I argue that in the Kyrgyzstani context, to consider the polarization of youth only on the basis of urban-rural division is insufficient, and there is political and ideological basis of that. Likewise, this work is a contribution to the Mudde’s theory that populism is a thin ideology. The main research method is qualitative, which includes semi-structured in-depth interviews. There were collected 21 interviews by participants in the October 2020 protests, which were analyzed through the prism of the economic condition of the interviewees, their reasons for participating in the protests, political preferences during the parliamentary elections of 2020 and subsequent elections, as well as their attitude towards the populist ideas of Japarov.