Kyrgyz and post-Soviet readers are largely unaware of so-called "Franco Syndrome," a phenomenon that has been attracting the interest of researchers studying post-Soviet countries that are in transition from one political system to another. By no means, that, in the first place, applies to Kyrgyzstan.

So what is Franco Syndrome? As is well known, in the last century, hot Spain had drivers who were at least as hot. The number of car accidents and deaths was increasing annually. So Spanish dictator Francisco Franco issued a speed limit decree during his last years in power. However, the highway police were as Spanish as the law-breaking speeders and enjoyed their "insanity dance" on the roads just as much - so the law existed only on paper. The citizens and the police, connected to each other by thousands of "mindset threads," practically ignored the head of state's decree. The existence of a formally valid law that is not implemented in practice has become known as Franco Syndrome.

Today, the clash of formal and informal rules of behavior on the "big political road" in Kyrgyzstan - intentionally or not - matches the definition of Franco Syndrome. Conflicts of interest between the law and informal political institutions create conflicts between broad, national and narrow, private interests, which are frequently decided in favor of the latter.

The simplest, most obvious definition of informal politics is that it is the practice of making significant political and economic decisions outside of the formal institutions of government and civil society. Here we should note that informal politics is widely practiced, not only in Kyrgyzstan but also all over the world. Considering the persistence of this political tradition, we can hardly talk about completely abolishing it and transferring politics communications entirely into formal institutions. This situation is even more common in contemporary Kyrgyzstan, considering its present social, cultural, and political traditions. Although informal politics can turn out to be a useful tool in some cases, it is worth noting that these successes are usually tactical and short-term.

Improving the predictability and efficiency of political processes and of the democratic institutions that are meant to implement them requires solving two interrelated problems.

The first is to find a legitimate compromise in the relationship between formal and informal politics that will allow the reduction of the negative influence of the latter on the process of making publicly important decisions. As experience shows, informal institutions are known for being resistant to change and for having "an enormous capacity for survival and flexibility." That is why there is no doubt that this issue cannot be resolved mechanically or through declarations.

That would require the resolution of another problem. In particular, it would require filling existing institutions of power and civil society with real content, which would result in a more transparent process of making decisions, implementing them, and controlling the implementation process. Until there is an effective, efficient competitor to informal politics, it will continue to be the determining factor in the political development of our country.

Assessing the phenomenon of informal politics in Kyrgyzstan, one can note several fundamental reasons why it has not only been preserved, but also expanded. Here, it is important to consider that informal politics is not an invention of sovereign Kyrgyzstan but, rather, appeared long before independence.

The first and the most obvious reason for the success of informal politics in Kyrgyzstan is the weakness and low effectiveness of the formal institutions of government. In the last 16 years, a new political system, which appears to meet basic democratic standards, has been almost fully constructed. At the same time, most institutions do not have real content, but are simply formal in nature. This circumstance is common not only in Kyrgyzstan, but also in the post-Soviet space in general, as most analysts and experts recognize.

And that is due to a combination of factors. The first was the rejection of most of the innovations brought by international supporters of reform in the early 1990s by the conservative, tribal environment of Kyrgyzstan. Since these imported principles did not have deep roots, since the country had traditionally low legal culture, since the government was new, the new principles were relegated to second place after informal institutions of power in the national decision-making process throughout the following years.

A vivid example to this is the situation involving political parties. Despite the fact that almost all politicians recognize the importance of political parties in a democratic reform of the government, they de facto cannot perform this function. The parties have fuzzy platforms and receive little feedback from the electorate. This means that they are weak and have limited influence on society. As a result, the political decision-making process has turned into a "gray" zone that is practically uncontrollable by the population, rather than being a nationwide, public discussion.

This is also related to the mechanism of political negotiation that is widely used in international practice, which becomes distorted in Kyrgyz conditions. Developed democracies have a process of political consultation on national problems that leads to the emergence of large party coalitions that take responsibility for their resolutions. In Kyrgyzstan, this process is launched
in moments of situations' culmination for making weak the positions of the possible political opponents. March 2005 and March 2007 were fairly good examples of this. In the first case, the government simply ignored its competitors, which naturally led to its fall. In the second case, using back-stage agreements, the government managed to win tactical victories, weakening the opposition.

Another significant problem for Kyrgyzstan is the principle of recruiting political "proto-elites" based on their regional backgrounds. Up to now it has been built upon tribal and clan structures that use any available means - even illegal ones - to promote their representatives. The purpose of this activity is clear: reinforcement of the advantageous positions of the "winners" (so-called "vertical power"), ensuring free access to usage of national resources for private interests. And the obvious example is March 2005.

Here it is worth noting a certain evolution of informal politics in Kyrgyzstan, which has occurred in recent centuries. One can distinguish several stages in this process. In the first stage, phenomena that we now call "informal politics" qualified as a formal politics. Decisions made within a clan were certainly legitimate in the sense that the decision-making process matched the contemporary social and cultural values of the local population. The discrepancy between principles of formal and informal politics that is characteristic of present-day Kyrgyzstan began to emerge at the beginning of the Soviet period, when institutions of power were created that contradicted the historical traditions of the nation. In particular, dissonance was created because the centralized nature of Soviet-era governance clearly contradicted the clan structure of the society, which still retained its significance, and the commonly held ideas that various heads of the republic obeyed to a certain extent. Thus, informal politics de facto received "illegal" status, although it remained quite legitimate from the point of view of specific mediums of power.

Today, to a large degree, the mechanisms and principles of political and executive power in Kyrgyzstan contribute to the opacity of Kyrgyz policy. The singular advantage of the president in the political space, despite the mythologization of the role of the nation in the election of leaders, naturally leads to several interrelated consequences. The first one is expressed through his unaccountability to other branches of power and civil society which normally have to express the public interests. The process of decentralizing the powers of the head of the state, which began in 2005-2006 was intentionally stopped in the middle/end of 2007. The restoration of the former status quo has logically resulted in exploitation of the head of the government by political groups close to him, mainly by relatives (so-called family) that have significant influence on him. A statement attributed to Kyrgyzstan's highest civil servant is illustrative: "I suffer the most from tyranny of my family and close associates."

This problem, common to all Central Asian states, already has its own name: "family-clan civilization."

To understand informal politics in Kyrgyzstan, it is important to consider competition within the clan and family for influence on the head of the state. Here, one may note the evolution of these relationships that has occurred in recent decades. Today a clan, despite its significance, has lost its previous position; now the family has become the dominating symbol of blood-ties. This trend has become fairly common for the country, as illustrated by recent social surveys. According to the surveys, only 2.6% of respondents identified themselves by clan, while 40% identified themselves by an analogical indicator for the family. We can add that clan solidarity, as a rule, increased if there were common issues requiring common solutions.

Consequently, it seems natural to come to the conclusion that the "family" - and not the abstractly conceived nation of Kyrgyzstan - has had a determining influence on the process of making the most important political and economic decisions in the country.

At the same time, the practice of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan displays the inconsistency of the "family" as an institution of informal politics. In particular, despite concurrence on positions and values in strategic questions, significant discrepancies in implementation tactics are obvious.

That is how a circle of potential allies or competitors, which is intended to contribute to/ impede the victory of a specific "interfamily" group has been defined and is still defined. In this regard, it is fairly predictable that the definition of a "family" should include not only blood relatives but also close political groups with functional roles ("wallet," "speechwriter," etc). In this sense, fairly common for "pre-March" Kyrgyzstan was the conflict that emerged between "a son-in-law of the whole Kyrgyz nation," Adil Toigonbaev, and son of the president, Aidar Akaev, which left an unavoidable mark on all other relationships inside "the family." Today the conflict inside the "family" remains, but is developing in a different way.

Opponents of the ruling regime actively7 use tools of informal politics. As an example we may give the various unofficial agreements made among opposition leaders during the numerous protests between 2002 and 2007. Sometimes they turned out to be fairly effective - as the events of March 2005 showed.

As a result, (apparent over-effectiveness and disavowal of long-term approval procedures with not always positive results) tools of informal politics retain a special attractiveness in the eyes of the majority of high-level politicians in Kyrgyzstan. Many of them speak against this phenomenon in public, while actively using it in various situations.

Continuing efforts for "installment" of tools and mechanisms of informal politics in the legal political space are especially interesting for our analysis. The beginning of this process was probably in the 1990s. One of the forms of its implementation was to create a submissive role for Parliament and a powerful role for the executive branch, headed by the president; that legitimized the decisions of a narrow circle of actors. In other words, allocation of a subordinate role to the Parliament was meant to create formal channels for implementing political decisions made in an informal way. Although this strategy has enjoyed some success, Parliament has struggled to retain its independence, trying to maintain its position as an independent political entity.

All these attempts came to their logical conclusion in the last Parliament, which has turned into a "legislative decorator" of decisions made in the House of Government. That is easily explained by the fact that the new Parliament was a product of informal politics. It is widely known how decisions about members of the "party-list" Parliament were made; the obvious proof of this is the government's resistance - even now - to publishing official results of the early Parliamentary elections held on December 16, 2007.

More recently, the next step in this situation has been taken. "Public representatives" decided that the executive branch, officially represented by the Government (but, de facto, by the President), may independently manage the country's strategic assets without the traditional procedure of coordination with the legislature. Thus, the dominance of informal politics over formal politics has been almost legalized in Kyrgyzstan, while a method of making decisions behind the scenes has been openly raised to the position of a state policy.

As we see, the existence and competition of formal and informal politics due to deformation of the political space in Kyrgyzstan inevitably leads to the victory of the latter. Representatives of the government gain - "like a thief in the in the silence of the night" - uncontrolled usage of resources for their own interests. In the second half of the 1990s, a decision about the conditions of mining gold at Kumtor was made, which resulted in a loss for the country. Today, this situation might be repeated with the possible privatization of leading segments of the energy sector and with the beginning of yet another redistribution of property.

Experts close to the ruling regime have made attempts to justify informal politics and even to claim that it is necessary to preserve and reinforce it at the expense of formal politics. This was demonstrated by the cycle of interviews with famous politicians and public figures published on the Bishkek Press Club's website in the beginning of March 2008.

Despite the seeming plausibility of the points made in support of informal politics, there is no doubt that this would be a dead end for the state's development. One of the direct negative outcomes is increasing alienation of the government from society and public disapproval of the state governance style due to a simple lack of understanding of nation-wide decision-making mechanisms.

Today it is extremely important to find methods that would allow the country's leading political forces to decrease the informal political space. Many recommendations - for a range of reasons - seem hard or almost impossible to implement, but it is vital to start moving step-by-step toward their execution. Briefly, recommendations based on practical experience can include:

1. Decentralization of the political space of Kyrgyzstan through a balanced and targeted redistribution of authority among legal actors represented by the president, the Government, the Parliament, the judicial branch, and civil society institutions. This would allow increased accountability for the actions of all branches of power (including the head of state) to each other and to civil society. It would also decrease pressure on the head of state from informal structures trying to use his authorities for their own interests.

2. Enhancement of the civil control over existing bodies of power. De facto unaccountability of the majority of bodies of power leads to a situation in which they mainly exist as "things in themselves" and "things for themselves." That results in numerous temptations for position-abusers and back-stage conversations regarding illegal utilizations of various types of resources, naturally leading to an expansion of the "gray zone" of Kyrgyz politics.

3. Increasing efficiency of political institutions and government bodies of power. The low level of effectiveness of the democratic institutions created in the early 1990's leads to a massive amount of mistrust on the part of the population. It also leads to a growth of ethno-political clientalism, wherein the more representatives of a specific sub-ethnic group's "own associates" sit in the government, the more protected representatives of this group feel. This phenomena leads to unavoidable conflicts among various groups, which are directly reflected in the nature and dynamics of the political process in Kyrgyzstan. Although individual experts tend to give a high assessment of norms and regulations of informal politics, considering it almost as a role model, periodic faults in this form of politics and failures to fulfill agreements lead to conflicts that are hard to solve and hard to explain.

4. Changes in the political recruiting process and human resource policy. In independent Kyrgyzstan, shameless neglect of the majority of democratic principles - including recruiting political elites on the basis of equal competition, transparency and professional qualities - has become a "nutritional medium" in which informal politics flourishes. The gap between declared goals and daily practice are one of the main obstacles to Kyrgyzstan entering the society of reasonably structured states, which act on the basis of real democratic norms.

5. Raising the role and significance of legally functioning political parties and movements. The weakness of a majority of political parties and movements obviously leads to the degradation of the overall national politics and the enhancement of the informal political segment. Besides, ongoing attempts to push opposition parties outside the legal space lead to a reduction in the transparency of the actions of the executive, which does not help to improve the situation.

However, the most essential condition for the reduction of the role of informal politics in Kyrgyzstan would be the presence of the main political actors' clearly stated political will to overcome this negative phenomenon. Before that happens, it is hardly possible to resolve this problem, which has a fundamental significance for the future of Kyrgyzstan.

Nur Omarov, Doctor of historical sciences, professor