Two months after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) held its first head-of-state level summit in a decade in Astana, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbaev has used his newly granted powers to set the next presidential election for early April, surprising all potential opposition political formations. In view of his general popularity throughout the country, the only question remaining would appear to be the size of his eventual winning margin. Still, the elections may provide much-needed experience and exposure for a younger generation of Kazakhstani politicians.
BACKGROUND: Nazarbaev, first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, became president in April 1990 and left his party post in August 1991. His new People’s Unity Party won the largest number of seats in the 1994 parliamentary elections. Nazarbaev then tacitly proclaimed war against the Soviet-era inherited state bureaucracy, which was bloated but also represented an opposing power base. After the 1994 elections, lobbies and alliances emerged between parliamentary groupings and the lower and middle ranks in the ministries. After an electoral fraud accusation by one anti-Nazarbaev candidate in a single electoral district, the Constitutional Court ruled the entire parliament illegal and dissolved it. That ruling short-circuited the potential opposition to Nazarbaev nascent from the emerging parliamentary-ministerial alliance. Nazarbaev ruled by decree for over a year. An April 1995 referendum extended his term in office for five years. A new constitution with a “semi-presidential” system on the French and Finnish model was adopted by referendum that autumn. The 1995 constitution reduced the parliament’s authority. Its physical removal to Astana further attenuated its influence.
The years 1994-95 marked the end of the post-Soviet intra-elite struggle in Kazakhstan. The winners cracked down on dissidence and weakened the institutions of the regime. Akezhan Kazhegeldin (prime minister, 1994–1997) was to have run against Nazarbaev as candidate of the Republican People’s Party (RPP), created in 1998 as vehicle for that purpose. However, the authorities did not allow his candidacy to be registered. Nazarbaev was overwhelmingly re-elected president in January 1999. In 2001 a new stage arose from the crisis around the creation of the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK) grouping, whose principal leaders resigned their ministerial portfolios to join this movement against the political influence of certain branches of Nazarbaev’s family. The president’s daughter Dariga Nazarbaeva formed the Asar party with a view towards the 2004 parliamentary elections. The Ak Zhol (“Bright Path”) Party formed from a split in the DCK movement after two of its leaders were sentenced to prison. In December 2005, Nazarbaev was again overwhelmingly re-elected.
Ak Zhol split in 2006 when four of its leaders broke away to form Naghyz Ak Zhol (“True” Ak Zhol), which renamed itself Azat (“Freedom”). Political conflict is thus mainly played out within the elite, members of which have known each other for years. The political class of the country was therefore severely shaken by the 2006 murder of Naghyz Ak Zhol leader Altynbek Sarsenbaev in suspicious circumstances. The 2006 merger of the Civic Party and Dariga Nazarbaeva’s Asar with Otan created the current ruling Nur-Otan Party, which swept every available seat at the 2007 parliamentary elections. In December 2010, Nur-Otan floated the balloon for a referendum allowing Nazarbaev to remain in office until 2020. A petition was reportedly signed by over half all registered voters. However, in January 2011 Nazarbaev vetoed the enabling constitutional amendments, whereupon parliament overrode his veto. Upon Nazarbaev’s referral, the Constitutional Council found the amendments unconstitutional. Nazarbaev then submitted draft legislation requesting authority to call a presidential election before the next planned for 2012, which parliament approved. The suddenness leaves all opposition parties unprepared to contest it. In the event, only 14 of the 22 individuals who submitted their candidacy passed the mandatory Kazakh-language test.
IMPLICATIONS: There are indications that Nazarbaev would have liked to leave active political life five to ten years ago and adopt a more godfatherly role, but circumstances did not permit this. Political conflicts within his family endangering the stability of the government (and which started even in the mid-/late 1990s) together with his seeing one after another member of the political and economic elite pass from government into opposition, complicated the task of executive administration. It is reasonable that he did not feel it possible to leave the office of president, despite the special status attributed to him by amendments the 1995 constitution guaranteeing a unique and guiding role even after leaving office. It would moreover be normal that Nazarbaev, having reached his seventieth year, took stock of the political system he wishes to leave to his country, whether he remains in office or not. The holding of a referendum, which was not necessarily his idea, would have set a bad precedent for the post-Nazarbaev future; calling the snap elections for April gives him political advantage over challengers (which he does not really need) and, in addition, the appearance of half-acquiescence to the petition drive for a referendum, which received wide and undoubtedly genuine popular support.
The state’s executive has profound capacity for political initiative, but arbitrary bureaucratic restrictions upon economic activity have led to a situation that critics characterize as “capitalism in one family.” Conflicts among various branches of Nazarbaev’s family, and also between the family and the technocrats, have consistently weakened formal political institutions. Small counter-elites willing to take political initiatives exist, but they risk being unable to break out of the syndrome of being a “Potemkin opposition” where some of them strike pragmatic alliances with the powers-that-be, leading in the end to their muzzling, while those not striking such alliances slide down into a spiral of silence. (The fate of the DCK/Ak Zhol movement is indicative in this respect). Thus only three of the 14 candidates approved for the snap presidential elections represent political parties, and none of these is oppositional to Nazarbaev. The main opposition party Azat declared its intention not to run a candidate and, indeed, not to participate in the election process at all.
Political pluralism in Kazakhstan is restricted to a relatively small political and economic elite. Opposition movements within the elite, such as DCK, have sought to liberalize policy for the simple purpose of technocratic and economic rationality. However, there continues to be an absence of socio-economic (i.e. “middle-class”) strata interested in and capable of supporting any alternative party. On the broader level of the “political community”, some scholars in Kazakhstan have emphasized the aspects of the political culture of historically nomadic Kazakh society that are conducive to broader decision-making participation. There is something to this argument, but there are differences among the three Hordes, and the political culture inherited from the Elder Horde in particular (which remains dominant through informal structures) militates against such democratization. The southern regions of the country are culturally more sympathetic to the charismatic authoritarianism of the country’s political leadership. Still more important, although some segments of society understand pluralist-participant democratic norms, nevertheless the country’s political life still lacks a genuine public sphere that could serve as a platform for interactive engagement with organized officialdom.
CONCLUSIONS: In May 2007 the parliament amended the constitution to allow Nazarbaev to seek re-election as many times as he might wish (but not his successors, who remain limited to two terms). Nazarbaev’s decision to remain indefinitely in the president’s seat exacerbated a subterranean power struggle within the ruling clans that was first felt in the late 1990s. Nazarbaev is the only president of a former Soviet republic other than Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov who still leads his country two decades after the USSR’s disappearance. New demographic strata need to be brought into Kazakhstan’s public life to facilitate the generational succession that must take place in preparation for Nazarbaev’s eventual passage from the scene.
The institutions of governance still suffer from a lack of cadre to serve as technocratic managers. Decision-making procedures are not routinized, and rules are not rationalized. The present exercise, or at least the next parliamentary elections in 2012, could provide the opportunity for such new generations to present themselves and gain experience and exposure on the regional and national levels, as the referendum campaign has already done at the local level. The present institutionalization of the present one-party-dominant system may possibly lead to a multiparty system, and then to the alternation of another party in power, as happened for example in Mexico and India in the twentieth century.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr Robert M Cutler (http://www.robertcutler.org [1]), educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The University of Michigan, has researched and taught at universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia. Now senior research fellow in the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University, Canada, he also consults privately in a variety of fields.