KAZAKHSTAN’S ELECTIONS: ASPIRATIONS FOR DEMOCRACY AMIDST EXPECTATIONS OF PATERNALISM
BACKGROUND: The expected rendering of the elections as undemocratic by the OSCE and the usual accusations by the losing parties managed to gather only a few hundred protesters in the center of Almaty on January 17. The charges leveled by the OSCE were that the elections “though well administered, did not meet key democratic principles.” The accusations of not facilitating “genuinely pluralistic elections” and not allowing all aspiring candidates and parties to enter free competition for the parliament seats comes as no surprise. After all, in a widely-held view, the authoritarian regime in Kazakhstan has been faking democratic processes for quite a while. The results are suggestive of this: 83 seats in the lower chamber went to the ruling Nur Otan party, 8 seats to the Ak Zhol (“bright path”), 7 seats to the KNPK (communist) party, and 9 seats reserved for the representatives of ethnic minorities through the assembly of the people.
The obvious question is: why go through the trouble of simulating a multi-party system if the parliament is overshadowed by the president anyway, and the most important policy decisions are made in the government and in the corridors of the presidential apparatus which are then just rubber-stamped in parliament? As several Kazakhstani analysts such as Daniyar Ashimbayev and Dosym Satpayev have noted, after many years of consolidating power in the institution of the presidency, the president himself and the ruling elite now want to transform the system from presidential to parliamentary-presidential. Having an almost omnipotent first president in the figure of Nazarbayev is seen as an exceptional situation of the first decades of independence, and it is presumed and hoped that the next president, whoever he or she is, should have far less power than Nazarbayev. In line with this vision for the future, the parliament has already started flexing its powers through the vote of confidence for the newly appointed “old” government of Karim Masimov. All presidential appointees have to be approved by parliament and it is legally possible (although it is difficult to imagine now) that the parliament might not always agree with the President.
IMPLICATIONS: The current Kazakh presidential system’s bureaucratic-procedural nature and commitment to the letter (if not the spirit) of the law should not be underestimated. The developed bureaucracy and bureaucratic procedure in Kazakhstan might have a positive impact on the future formalization of the presidential-parliamentarian system. Many observers from CIS countries and even OSCE observers have noted the “well-administered” conduct of the elections. For instance, in light of the plans to install video-cameras into each election booth in the upcoming presidential elections in Russia, Russian observers noted that the Kazakh authorities’ use of transparent polling boxes have almost the same effect of observability as can be achieved by video cameras. In Kazakhstan’s polling stations, voters first proceed to identify themselves and pick up the bulletin, then go to the curtained voting booth where they can mark their bulletin after which they emerge from the booth, and slide the bulletin in a tiny voting slot in a transparent box in front of observers and the public. Many observers of Kazakhstani elections admit that even though the voter turnout in Kazakhstan is suspiciously high, the numbers are usually proved and well-supported by the lists of registered voters. So far, no evidence has been found to question the official figures of voter turnout. It does indeed seem that Kazakhstani citizens do come to vote in great numbers and these numbers far exceed the number of voters in many established democracies.
Why do people in an authoritarian country like Kazakhstan turn up to vote in great numbers with most of them casting their votes for the ruling party? Needless to say, Nur Otan is popular first and foremost because it is the party of the president. It is widely perceived as a party of the people who “know how to rule the country” and, as it stands now, few want to change the balance of power to people who might declare themselves more democratic but are seen as disgruntled former officials and oligarchs who want a return to “kormushka” (distribution of benefits).
Nazarbayev’s regime has been a stunning success in terms of its broad political appeal, popularity and endurance. The politics of aspirations – the alliance between the regime and aspiring middle classes – lies at the core of the regime’s endurance. There is also a link between the attachment to modernization (i.e. the vision that the people of Kazakhstan need to collectively improve their socio-economic conditions) and attachment to a certain degree of authoritarianism. The state paternalism and authoritarianism in this vision is not seen as a mechanism of repression of individual rights and autonomy, but as a mechanism for enabling these rights and entitlements. In this sense, the democratic aspirations of the people unfold together with the expectations of paternalism – a wide-spread understanding that the purpose of the state is to provide for the people and find solutions to their socio-economic problems.
Pointing to this curious mixture of democratic aspirations and expectations of paternalism is, for instance, the fact that the most widespread form of democratic politics in Kazakhstan is writing open letters to the President. Almost all oppositional actors on Kazakhstan’s political stage have been engaged in this form of political bargaining. Examples include the self-exiled oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov who, from his golden refuge in London, recently wrote an open letter to the President saying that only he can turn things around at the indebted BTA bank, which he owned before it was effectively nationalized in 2008. Multiple groups of middle-class investors who privately invested in different housing projects during the construction boom have been demanding, through protests and appeals (including open letters to the President), that the state take it upon itself to see through to completion their unfinished or frozen housing projects.
Even the recent riots in the Zhanaozen can be seen in this light as a desperate attempt to bring to the attention of the President and the government the entitlement of the residents in Zhanaozen to well-paid jobs in the oil industry. It is worth noting that the situation in Zhanaozen has been pacified only with the arrival of the President, amidst promises that the families of those who were killed would be paid retribution and that all the oil workers in town would be re-employed by the national oil company.
CONCLUSIONS: To put it simply, Nazarbayev has usurped huge power but the majority of people in Kazakhstan continue to support him, and by association his party, precisely because they see that a concentrated power is needed to ensure order and stability and to provide solutions to the social problems of the day. The ruling elite and, perhaps, Nazarbayev himself, however, hope that this power which is now concentrated in the figure of Nazarbayev can be institutionalized and subsequently inherited not just by the next president (as happened, for instance, in Turkmenistan) but by an institution, such as a parliament or a ruling party, which would be supported by the people in the same way that Nazarbayev himself was supported. So far, the institution of the Majilis never had the same legitimacy as the president. The people have seen it for what it was – a rubber-stamping organ for the decisions of the government and the president. But a multi-party parliament with representatives of other (if not outright oppositional) parties and an upgraded Nur Otan faction, which this time around also includes well-known public figures such as the president’s daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva and a widely published and broadcast government analyst Maulen Ashimbayev, will enliven the debate and can bring public recognition to this underestimated and underperformed institution.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Alima Bissenova is a post-doctoral fellow with the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. She recently completed a doctorate in Anthropology at Cornell University and defended her dissertation “Post-socialist Dreamworlds: Housing Boom and Urban Development in Kazakhstan.”
