The Illusions of Post-Nazarbayev Kazakhstan

When Kazakhstan’s ruling party, Nur Otan, obtained 71 percent of the vote in the January 10 parliamentary elections, nobody seemed surprised. Kazakhstan is still firmly ruled by the same Nazarbayev-centric elite that has dominated the past three decades. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the leader of Kazakhstan for almost 30 years until his resignation in 2019, continues to be the country’s top decision-maker.

Nur Otan is Nazarbayev’s personal party. It is so personal that he is the president of the party and the “Nur” part of the party’s logo was, until recently, a replica of his signature. The party has not lost an election since its formation in 1999. 

New legislation regarding the election of deputies gave political leaders full control of the party lists, depriving voters of the possibility to choose their favorite candidates.

It is no surprise that people’s excitement for the election was low.

“I heard there are elections today. But for what?” a friend in Almaty asked, adding that she had no interest in going to the polls for what she thought was going to be “the same old circus.”

Despite Kazakhstan holding elections regularly, the organizations and faces that end up forming the parliamentary roster and the government seldom change.

In the past three years a few alternative and opposition movements have emerged. The Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) was revived by its founder, fugitive banker Mukhtar Ablyazov, after he was released from a French prison in late 2016. In October 2019, opposition journalist Zhanbolat Mamai founded the Democratic Party (DP), a nationalist party that often uses anti-corruption slogans similar to the DVK. A protest during the Almaty marathon in April 2019 brewed discontent among a younger crowd that grew to become Oyan, Qazaqstan! (OQ), a movement that was the protagonist of several subsequent public rallies.

Yet the dozens of activists that sometimes take to the streets represent no threat to the government, which routinely responds with hundreds, if not thousands, of police, special security forces, and plain-clothed KGB agents to face off with protesters. Preventive arrests were used extensively before and after Kassym-Jomart Tokayev replaced Nazarbayev as president in 2019, continuously hindering the growth of opposition organizations.

Vyacheslav Abramov, editor of Vlast.kz, one of the most respected news outlets in the country, wrote that the elections were akin to an illusion. Taking Abramov’s argument further, the 2021 elections were a primer on three illusions that have characterized the so-called “post-Nazarbayev” era. Although we have repeatedly heard and read the words transition, competition, and pluralism, these have remained little but empty slogans.

The Illusion of Transition

While a managed transition was expected, many were surprised by Nazarbayev’s decision to leave office in March 2019. As he was the last Soviet-era leader to relinquish power, it seemed that the post-Soviet transition had reached its completion. Yet, as already demonstrated with the cases of Belarus and Tajikistan, or in more emblematic style in Turkmenistan, the leadership style of post-Soviet successors has seldom marked a departure from the closed political system of the USSR.

The death of Uzbekistan’s first president, Islam Karimov, in 2016 perhaps was a wakeup call for the aging Nazarbayev, who decided to formally quit on his own terms. By leaving office, he made the conscious choice of handing power to the Senate’s leader, Tokayev, who had been a loyal figure for two decades.

Leaving, yet continuing to manage and balance the political environment, was Nazarbayev’s main goal. So far, almost two years after his resignation, he has accomplished that objective. Despite rumors of changes in the balance of power, there have been only a few reshuffles among the Kazakhstani political elite and the most influential businessmen of yesteryear have maintained their grip on the local economy.

Arguably, the word “transition” was never pertinent to Kazakhstan. Even in the 1990s, it was difficult to gauge where the country was departing from and where it was destined to go. Nazarbayev’s rule has remained a constant for three decades.

In 2019, Madi Akhmetov of the youth faction of the Nur Otan party publicly asked then-acting President Tokayev to build a monument to Nazarbayev in Almaty. Now, at 25, he will serve as the youngest member of the newly elected parliament.

In mid-2020, Dariga Nazarbayeva, the first president’s eldest daughter, was dismissed from her post as Senate chair, prompting talks of a power struggle. Yet again, however, Nazarbayeva came back as a candidate for Nur Otan, and will now serve as a member of the parliament, the Majilis.

The 2021 parliamentary elections once again failed the “free and fair” test of the monitoring mission of the Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). 

In its monitoring report, the OSCE said the election “lacked genuine competition.” More than a contest between different parties, the election represented a reminder that the proclaimed “competition” was just another illusion to mask the endurance of Nazarbayev’s rule.

The Illusion of Competition

In June 2020, Tokayev signed into law a bill recognizing the legality of political opposition in parliament. The initiative was heralded as a first step in enhancing competition in the political field in the country.

History, however, tells the story of hegemony on part of Nur Otan, making the parliament a rubber-stamp institution for Nazarbayev’s initiatives.

Since 2007, the Majilis has been composed of 98 elected members plus nine representatives from the Assembly of the People – an organization formed to advocate for the rights of minorities. While formal electoral rules favor established parties and thwart the growth of new ones, because of the high minimum threshold (7 percent nationally) and the complex registration system, opposition parties are de facto barred from entering the political arena.

The Alga party tried to no avail to register ahead of elections between 2006 and 2012 and was ultimately banned on “extremism” grounds. The DVK, founded in 2001 by Ablyazov, has lived most of its existence in the shadows, before also being banned as an extremist organization in 2018. In 2020, Mamai’s DP was unable to obtain a legal registration and could not participate in the elections. 

While the 7 percent voting threshold seemed unsurmountable in 2007, when Nur Otan won all 98 seats, in 2012 two historically loyal parties entered the Majilis: the Democratic Party Ak Zhol and the Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstan. However, the overwhelming majority of the votes cast went in favor of Nur Otan, which won 83 and 84 seats in the 2012 and 2016 elections, respectively.

When the “Nazarbayev era” purportedly ended in March 2019 with his resignation, observers who expected a wind of change were disappointed, as the new leadership showed a similar attitude toward political freedoms. The 2021 parliamentary elections were no exception: The same three parties surpassed the threshold and entered the Majilis, with Nur Otan obtaining 76 seats, Ak Zhol 12, and the no longer “Communist” People’s Party snagging 10 seats.

While Nur Otan lost eight seats and voter turnout fell to 63 percent, the ruling party still holds a supermajority.

Political and institutional continuity was cemented a few days later when Tokayev first announced the need to have a government reshuffle and then only swapped two ministers, leaving the balance of power essentially unchanged. It is important to note that the main ministerial positions, the backbone of the government, were appointed by Nazarbayev just four weeks before he resigned and most remain in office. 

The 2021 election campaign was tainted by repression and, days before the elections, dozens were arrested across the country in what the local Bureau of Human Rights termed “pre-holiday hysteria.” Ablyazov’s attempt to swing the political environment, calling for a protest vote for other parties that managed to be registered in the ballots, also led one of the registered opposition parties to quit the race entirely rather than be associated with him.

Several observers noted that the 2021 Majilis elections were not to be considered a testing ground for Kazakhstan’s democratic performance, but a dress rehearsal for a struggle between the various elites. The failure of the Auyl Party and Adal to earn more than 7 percent of the votes was perhaps a sign that the real war between elites has been postponed. When asked about potential ties to Timur Kulibayev, Nazarbayev’s son-in-law and one of Kazakhstan’s richest people, Adal’s secretary Serik Sultangali did not confirm or deny such a connection. It is indubitable, however, that Sultangali was close to the Nazarbayev family, given his past as general director of the country’s gas transportation monopoly, KazTransGas.

As the same old faces repopulated the front row of the decision-making process, the “pluralism” mantra also emerged as an illusion.

The Illusion of Pluralism

When Nazarbayev resigned, the people of Kazakhstan were caught in a state of shock. Then a fresh sensation, a widespread desire for change, emerged. The energy that the people had accumulated during the old regime materialized in the streets with a spike in public demonstrations.

The emergence of the OQ youth movement and the establishment of the DP gave rise to hopes that the political environment would become populated with a wider range of organizations.

Yet organized protests were not always successful in sneaking past the violent hand of the regime, which suppressed most of the demonstrations with arrests and, most recently, with “kettling,” a police tactic for the control of crowds that was used on Independence Day, December 16, and on Election Day, January 10, against the two opposition groups. In the latter case, two dozen Oyan, Qazaqstan! activists were kept inside a ring of special police with locked arms for up to seven hours, at temperatures below freezing.

The systematic repression of opposition forces represents a reminder that civil society can only move within the firm borders that the government has drawn. Any attempt to cross the boundaries is met with batons and handcuffs.

The government’s massive show of force has hindered the growth of opposition movements, which are confined to Almaty and only sparsely present in other cities. By optimistic accounts, they number in the hundreds and take the squares by the dozens, while the authorities always react with much larger manpower and greater resources.

Similarly to the presidential elections of June 2019, people in Kazakhstan protested the piloted call to the polls for January 10. The severity with which the protestors were repressed was also similar.

As dozens of activists were encircled and arrested, Tokayev said that the government had not taken “any repressive measures against the protest sentiments.”

While in his September 2019 Address to the Nation Tokayev unveiled his concept of a “listening state” that would respond quickly to the requests of the citizens, such a policy has yet to be implemented.

So far, Tokayev’s listening state has rushed headlong on the same path charted by Nazarbayev, blind and deaf toward the demonstrations and pleas of dissatisfied citizens.

As the head of the OSCE election monitoring mission, Jaroslaw Domanski, said in an interview, the authorities have not shown goodwill in their promises for change. In a similar vein, the annual report by watchdog Human Rights Watch stated that “promises for reform did not bring about meaningful improvements in Kazakhstan’s human rights record in 2020.”

Promises of radical reforms, rumors of elite struggles, and calls for a generational change in the leadership will have to materialize in a sincere and significant way before observers can close the chapter on the “Nazarbayev era” and their analyses on this interminable “twilight zone” would finally be applicable to a long-awaited sunset, the precursor of a new day for Kazakhstan.