There are more than 3.5 million registered voters in Turkmenistan. 

Or so, at least, election officials said last week. 

This is no small matter since mystery persists over just how many people live in Turkmenistan. An RFE/RL Turkmen service report from 2021 quoted three government insiders as saying that the number of people living in the country could be as low as 2.8 million.

A population and housing census is said to have taken place over a 10-day period in December – that was the third census in the country’s modern history. Results are expected by the middle of this year. 

A figure purporting to attest to how many people are eligible to vote gives some sense of what to expect, although nobody can know how accurate the figures are.

If this is on the agenda at all it is because Turkmenistan goes to the polls on March 26. Turkmenistan is well-used to the choreography of election-holding. Voters will be able to cast their ballot at more than 2,600 polling stations, of which 240 will be equipped with cameras for live-streaming voting on the website of the Central Elections Commission.  

The whole day is an exercise in futility. Most of the 125 seats in the legislature, or Mejlis, will go to the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan, a de facto successor to the Soviet-era Communist Party. A couple of other parties representing loyal businesspeople and farmers will also be apportioned a slice of seats. 

As of March 20, Turkmenistan formally reverted once again to a unicameral system. A law to that effect was published in the state newspaper. This puts a swift and ignominious end to a very brief experiment with bicameralism, which began with the creation of an upper house in September 2021. The only apparent purpose of that little distraction was to install former President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov as speaker of the Senate and thereby give him constitutionally near co-equal status with his successor (and son), President Serdar Berdymukhamedov.

The predicament has since been fixed by simply labelling Berdymukhamedov the elder the “National Leader” and making him a de facto joint president.

This ambiguous situation means it is never entirely certain who is calling the shots and speaking for the country. But it was Berdymukhamedov the younger who travelled to Qatar for a two-day state visit on March 19. (The Turkmen president is coming to be a familiar face in Doha – he travelled to the city in December to watch a World Cup quarterfinal match and even found time to meet a fellow, unaccountable president, the head of the FIFA global soccer ruling body, Gianni Infantino).

Official media have talked up this latest trip as a historic milestone. The basis for such grand discourse is that Berdymukhamedov was in Qatar to inaugurate the opening of a diplomatic mission in the country.

Leaving aside the mutual expression of undying admiration and respect, the thing that really interests Ashgabat is Qatari investment. Berdymukhamedov met while in Doha with some representatives of the local business community. An exhibition of wares produced by Turkmen companies for putative Qatari investors and importers to investigate included carpets, herbal tea and chocolate, just in case any of these items is hard to locate in the Middle East. 

This traveling salesman routine – earlier perfected by Berdymukhamedov the elder – has been framed as part of a quixotically top-down attempt to cultivate a small and medium enterprise sector in Turkmenistan. At a Cabinet meeting last month, the president said that at least 71.3 percent (the reason for the specificity of this figure is unclear) of the country’s economy (minus the oil and gas sector) should come to be accounted for by the private sector by the end of this year. A few days before the president travelled to the Middle East, the parastatal Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs marked its 15th anniversary with the holding of a trade fair in Ashgabat at which more than 200 companies were present. Much of the goods on show, which ranged from clothing to candy and speedboats to condiments, are designed to negate the need for imports of the same items. For any of the companies to survive in the real world, the same goods will need to be exported too, but will anybody bite? Time will tell.

The real, and elusive, prize for Turkmenistan is to get Qatar to sink its money into the trans-Afghan TAPI natural gas pipeline. Berdymukhamedov duly raised the matter during his visit. Considering that two of the countries in that four-letter acronym – Pakistan and India – are currently buyers of Qatari gas, it is not immediately obvious what interest Doha would have in supporting implementation of this project. 

Back-to-front reasoning is the trademark of the Berdymukhamedov regime.

On August 20, Ashgabat played host to a conference to discuss the “potential of tourism development in Turkmenistan.” If the government had not spent billions of dollars that could have been better used elsewhere developing its Awaza resort on the Caspian Sea, this level of bizarre delusion might not be so egregious. As things stand, it is extremely difficult, costly and often impossible to obtain a tourist visa to enter the country, all of which makes the idea of building a leisure sector a non-starter. 

Turkmen tourism officials think they have come up with a solution though. Options are again being explored, along with fellow Caspian nations, which also comprise Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Russia, on organizing cruise tours around the inland sea. Why anybody would want to spend large amounts of money being slowly sailed to an overpriced resort in Turkmenistan when they could sun themselves in Thailand and Turkey for a fraction of the price is a question that tourist officials in Ashgabat never see fit to address. 

More dramatically, as Amsterdam-based Turkmen.news reported on March 14, it continues to be complicated for Turkmen nationals to get outside the country. Young people studying abroad must now jump through yet more bureaucratic hoops to get their passports renewed. Specifically, the students must organize for their place of study to submit a written request to Turkmenistan’s migration service to issue or replace a travel document. 

That is not all. The applicants are also required to make an appointment to see the head of the local migration office in their place of residence and, as Turkmen.news has claimed, citing unnamed sources, then give that person a bribe.