With unexpectedly high turnout nationwide on April 5, many inside and outside Afghanistan were quick to highlight participation as the major success story of the 2014 elections. But a positive note from this year's process that has received less praise has been the relatively small role ethnicity seems to have played for candidates during their campaigns as well as voters on Election Day.
Afghan politics are often seen as ethnically-charged, especially with with the tumultuous history of conflict between the country's numerous and diverse ethnic groups in mind. But with the many political, economic and social changes that have taken place over the past decade since the fall of the Taliban regime, there have been many signs that prejudice and factionalism in Afghanistan has begun to slowly but surely give way to a growing national identity.
According to Nadir Naderi, the head of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), one of the country's largest election monitoring groups, a survey that was organized just before the elections indicated most voters did not plan to vote based on ethnic allegiances.
“The survey we conducted before the elections was persuasive, because the majority of the voters weren’t intending to vote on the basis of ethnicity,” Mohseni said on Tuesday.
The Independent Election Commission's (IEC) top official, Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani, echoed that sentiment and pointed to specific examples of how candidates in this year's presidential race received support from constituencies from around the country, and not just ones tied to them by ethnicity or locality.
“Candidates received voted from various regions of the country," Nuristani told TOLOnews on Tuesday. "For instance, Abdullah Abdullah did not receive all of his votes from Tajik dominated areas or Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai from Pashtun dominated areas - the votes are totally mixed and national."
The IEC's website shows province-by-province breakdown of the election results, illustrating just how inter-mixed and perhaps counterintuitive support for the top two candidates was.
“We learnt the lesson of national unity and democracy from the elections,” one Kabul resident named Wida told TOLOnews. “We saw in the elections that the youth votes on the programs of candidates, not their ethnicity."
The vast majority of Afghans are currently under the age of 25, and Afghan youth were expected to play a major role in this year's election process. In the longer term though, the new generation of Afghans raised in the post-Taliban era have undoubtedly come of age in a different country from the one of their parents and grandparents. For them, the stage of politics is less local, ethnic and tribal, and more national and international.
“People have started step-by-step embracing democracy and it is a positive message to the next generation,” another Kabul resident named Safiullah said.
Source/Fuente: http://www.tolonews.com/elections2014/election-shows-potential-politics-...
