One month before the early parliamentary elections in Kazakhstan scheduled for January 15 and 16, 2012, the majority of the country’s political parties have already started intensive preparations in a bid to ensure their representation in the Kazakh Parliament’s lower chamber, the Majilis (comprised of 107 deputies). The NurOtan, which is officially headed by President Nursultan Nazarbayev, was the first among forefront political organizations to divulge its list of candidates consisting of 127 persons. Out of these, 48 were deputies in the Majilis’ previous legislature and will most likely be reelected into office. The remaining 79 candidates have very different backgrounds varying from former ministers and cabinet-level officials (such as the chairman of the Agency for protection of competition) to regional governors, to representatives of sports and culture (the head of Kazakhstan’s national cycling team among them).
The most prominent public figures proposed by the NurOtan presidium include not only the current Secretary of State and former Minister of Foreign Affairs Kanat Saudabayev, who recently carried out the duties of OSCE chairman during Kazakhstan’s presidency, but also Dariga Nazarbayeva, President Nazarbayev’s elder daughter. Most experts believe that the eventual election of Nazarbayeva to the Majilis will reconfirm her own political ambitions and highlight her father’s approval of her return to active political life. Nazarbayeva has been largely absent from the domestic political scene since 2007, when her now ex-husband Rakhat Aliyev had to flee the country because of the serious charges brought against him in connection with a presumed plot to overthrow President Nazarbayev.
The main opposition party OSDP Azat, which was born in 2009 out of the merger of two different organizations, the All-national social-democrat party and the Azat movement, decided to field 57 candidates who are going to represent the party’s electoral program under the OSDP label. The inability of Kazakhstan’s most outspoken opposition movement to participate in the upcoming elections in its present format can only be explained by the fact that it has still not formalized the act of merger through a lengthy and burdensome procedure of registration. Despite these administrative difficulties, the party’s leaders are confident that at least half of the population will support their platform and help the OSDP Azat become a serious counterweight to the NurOtan’s overwhelming role in Parliament. “We will not agree with any statements saying on or after January 16 that we are in the third or fourth position or have not simply won any seats at all”, said one of the party’s leaders, Bulat Abilov, at the 9th extraordinary assembly in Almaty on November 26.
The next day, 79 candidates were presented by another political movement, the Ak Zhol party headed by Azat Peruashev, a successful businessman whose career took a different turn with his unexpected election to the Ak Zhol’s leading position a few months ago. Though Peruashev and his supporters occasionally engage in criticizing the government’s policies, the Ak Zhol party has recently received warm compliments from President Nazarbayev’s advisor Yermukhamet Yertysbayev in whose opinion the party’s current leadership has all the chances at hand to mobilize potential voters and thus gain prominence in the course of the January 2012 elections.
The Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstan also aims to obtain representation in the Majilis. However, the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, from which it split in 2004 as a result of an internal struggle for influence, cannot participate in the electoral campaign after the court’s decision to ban it from all political activities for six months starting in early October. Another marginal contestant is the Patriotic Party of Kazakhstan whose membership includes two former candidates to the presidency in the April 2011 elections. One of them, who is currently a senator, has recently disavowed all the rumors concerning his probable candidacy, promising instead “to support the party from the Senate.” Two other parties, the Auyl (“village”) and the Adilet (“justice”), are unanimously considered to be insufficiently known and to have too limited administrative resources to be able to organize a broad-based campaign for the voters’ hearts and minds. At the same time, the big surprise came from the side of Kazakh nationalists headed by poet Mukhar Shakhanov. This marginal group recently propagating the exclusion of the Russian language from the Constitution and the adoption of a revised bill on official languages is now allied with the Rukhaniyat (“spirituality”) movement whose political platform was previously based on the promotion of an environmental agenda. Together, these two groups have presented 27 candidates and will build their campaign upon a few distinct issues, such as renewed support for ethnic Kazakhs migrating to their historic motherland, the closure of all military sites and the only nuclear power plant on the Caspian Sea, and the revival of Kazakh culture.