The Old Politics of New Kazakhstan

Some things, it seems, never change.

In late February 2019, as social unrest was sweeping across Kazakhstan’s main urban centers, Nursultan Nazarbayev – Kazakhstan’s first and, at the time, only president – proceeded to sack the government led by Bakytzhan Sagintayev. In appointing a new prime minister, Asqar Mamin, Nazarbayev promised the population at large that the new cabinet would indeed address the many socioeconomic inequalities affecting Kazakhstan. 

Fast forward five years to early 2024 and we find eerily similarly dynamics at play in Kazakhstan’s halls of power. On February 6, 2024, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Nazarbayev’s handpicked successor, reshuffled the government, instructing incoming Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov to quickly develop a comprehensive agenda to relaunch the Kazakhstani economy, which, well into the mid-2020s, remains in a state of stagnation.

The regime’s regular recourse to normally ineffectual remedies (governmental reshuffles) to address entrenched economic problems (stuttering productivity and rampant inequality) suggests that not much has changed in Kazakhstan between 2019 and 2024. This quinquennium, however, has to be seen as one of the most eventful periods in this country’s recent history. During this time, two era-defining moments – Nazarbayev’s resignation on March 19, 2019, and Qandy Qantar, Kazakh for “Bloody January,” in early January 2022 – had the potential to drastically change Kazakhstan’s political scene, altering in decisive fashion the inner workings of Kazakhstani politics.

By revisiting the landmark events that have so far defined the post-Nazarbayev era, I argue we should consider continuity, rather than change, as the most appropriate lens to trace the trajectory followed by Kazakhstani politics after Nazarbayev’s momentous withdrawal from the presidency. How do we explain, in other words, the minimal degree of political transformation experienced by Kazakhstan across the last five years?

The very event that opened the post-Nazarbayev era needs some reassessment to begin with. Nazarbayev’s voluntary relinquishment of the presidency constituted an unprecedented decision for a leader who enjoyed unencumbered power all the way up to the end of his long tenure (1991-2019). Even more extraordinary was the appointment of a handpicked successor with no family links to Nazarbayev himself. The Kazakhstani transition was in this sense different from those completed in other Caspian states, namely Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, where dynastic succession within the Aliyev (2003) and the Berdimuhamedov (2022) families entrenched local authoritarian governance for the long run. 

The tranzit vlasti (Russian for “power transfer”) completed in Astana throughout 2019 was a unique development. It came to signal the conclusion of the very first non-dynastic, managed transition out of authoritarian rule attempted across post-Soviet Eurasia. Ultimately, however, many of the problems that routinely returned to affect Kazakhstan across the last five years originated in the 2019 transition.

Nazarbayev’s resignation, and Tokayev’s subsequent accession to the presidency, were meant to perfect a process of leadership change rather than pursuing a more encompassing agenda of regime transformation. Kazakhstani politics, in other words, was to remain firmly non-democratic even after the country’s first post-independence leader had left his post. The formalization of the post-Nazarbayev presidency had at its very core a substantive democratic deficit: the election that allowed Tokayev to formally enter Ak Orda, the presidential palace, was profoundly non-competitive. Widespread protests – which attracted the regime’s typically repressive response – erupted across Kazakhstani territory in the leadup to and, most violently, on June 9, 2019, the day of the vote.

The anti-Tokayev demonstrations of mid-2019 reveal the hallmarks of the relatively consolidated culture of protest and contestation that characterized Kazakhstani political debate in 2019-2022. These demonstrations, moreover, capture a major weakness affecting the process that established the post-Nazarbayev order: By noting the state-managed nature of the 2019 electoral competition, protesters indirectly challenged the legitimacy of Tokayev’s accession to power, seeing in the new president the continuation of an established, and certainly decaying, order rather than the harbinger of much-needed change.

The early post-Nazarbayev era was essentially defined by the often-uneasy cohabitation between Kazakhstan’s departing president and his successor. While Nazarbayev had formally retired from the presidency, he retained a series of honorary posts that revealed his actual powers. He accessed lifelong chairmanships of the hegemonic Nur Otan party as well as of Kazakhstan’s National Security Council, while holding the title of Elbasy, Leader of the Nation. The structure of the managed transition meant members of the extended Nazarbayev family did not have to interrupt their political careers or cease their business activities; moreover, key allies of the outgoing president – and Karim Massimov, the long-time head of the Kazakhstani National Security Committee (KNB), in particular – remained in their posts, ensuring regime continuity beyond leadership change. 

Tokayev himself appeared, at least during the early months of his tenure, as merely the spokesperson for decisions made elsewhere. In the first executive order issued after Nazarbayev’s resignation, Tokayev renamed Kazakhstan’s capital after his predecessor: Between 2019 and early 2022, Astana was known as Nur-Sultan, in a striking manifestation of a rising cult of personality for a supposedly retired leader.

The regime agenda of the cohabitation years (2019-2022) saw Tokayev resorting with greater frequency to populist measures to address the country’s many economic woes. Through the most notable of these measures, the government bailed out large swathes of the Kazakhstani population, as it approved an economic package worth almost $1 billion to extend debt relief to over 3 million people. Political change, conversely, remained an essentially cosmetic part of this agenda.

In announcing his first significant set of policies allegedly departing from existing regime practice, Tokayev used his inaugural annual speech to the population (known in Russian as poslanie) to broadcast his intention to transform Kazakhstan into a “state that listens to the voice of its people.” The listening state narrative aimed to bridge the gap that existed between the regime’s many agendas and the people’s demands for socioeconomic reforms and political change. These demands, importantly, had become louder throughout Nazarbayev’s closing decade in power, a long goodbye during which Kazakhstan’s economy stagnated as its politics inevitably withered. While gaining much traction in Kazakhstan’s post-2019 public diplomacy, this narrative did not, however, lead to the inclusion of dissenting voices in the public debate nor did it see the boundaries of the Kazakhstani political scene expanding to parties or movements not completely aligned with the regime.

It turns out that, actually, another form of listening had indeed been going on in Kazakhstan throughout 2019. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) revealed in a July 2021 report that one of Tokayev’s mobile phones had been infected with the Pegasus spyware and placed under surveillance not too long before his accession to the presidency. As Tokayev’s name popped up in the Pegasus list, it became apparent that powerful segments of the Kazakhstani elite had concerns about the new president’s loyalty to the Nazarbayev power system. This apparent split within the regime returned to the surface most dramatically during the Qandy Qantar events in January 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic entrenched the weakness of Kazakhstan’s underperforming economy and exposed even further the regime’s manifest disinterest in political reform. Tokayev’s failure to introduce meaningful change had become all the more visible as the Kazakhstani government managed the emergency politics set off by large-scale COVID-19 outbreaks. Seen from a regime standpoint, COVID-19 became a convenient fig leaf for a comprehensive power grab. The leadership in Nur-Sultan – just as its Central Asian counterparts did – endeavored to curtail even further the freedoms of expression and association of Kazakhstani citizens and, moreover, engaged in murky international deals that ended up reinforcing the leadership’s kleptocratic control over Kazakhstan’s state resources and business sector.

Kazakhstan emerged from the pandemic as an essentially dysfunctional authoritarian system, in which a disgruntled population tended to offer very limited support to the central regime, which had in turn to contend with a worrying degree of elite fragmentation. Lack of legitimacy and regime disunity were the two explosive forces that drove the events collectively known as Qandy Qantar, the second landmark event that changed the course of Kazakhstani history across the last five years.

In early 2022, Qandy Qantar revealed the instability underpinning an authoritarian regime that, three years before, had attempted to regenerate itself through a managed leadership transition. Qandy Qantar sanctioned the failure of this experiment and opened the Tokayev era in earnest by determining Nazarbayev’s ultimate exit from the political scene. 

The opacity surrounding the onset of the turbulence of January 2022 points to the complexity of the overlapping agendas at play during Qandy Qantar. There certainly was a dimension of contestation sitting at the core of this landmark event, revealing in full the potential held by the protest culture developed between 2019-2021 by non-mainstream groups, including Oyan, Qazaqstan (Wake up, Kazakhstan). Another key driver of unrest in early January 2022 was represented by the population’s discontent with the government’s economic policies. 

The initial spark, it ought to be noted, erupted in Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan, where, on January 2, 2022, citizens had taken to the streets to protest an increase in the price of liquified petroleum gas (LPG). As the echoes of the Zhanaozen protest reached the eastern part of the country, the nature of the grievances mutated into a more comprehensive set of demands for political transformation, which included the dismantlement of the Nazarbayev power system and the establishment of a parliamentary republic in Kazakhstan. By January 4, local and international media were reporting that approximately 100,000 citizens were protesting in virtually every Kazakhstani region, with demonstrations organized in all major cities across the country, including Almaty and Nur-Sultan.

We will never know whether the protests of early January were to organically evolve into a revolution: On the evening of January 4, 2022, Almaty’s largely peaceful protests were highjacked by unidentified groups of men who engaged violently with security forces, looted shops, and burned government buildings, including the centrally located headquarters of the regional akimat. It was only via the support of a contingent of CSTO troops, mostly comprising Russian military personnel, deployed in Almaty on January 6 that Tokayev managed to restore order.

This characterization of Qandy Qantar points to three fundamental conclusions. The deployment in Almaty of a CSTO contingent indicated, to begin with, that the Kazakhstani president no longer trusted his own security services. Tokayev, in this sense, understood the violence of January 4 as the initial stage of an anti-regime coup.

Second, Tokayev perceived fragmentation within his supporting elite as the key driver of this attempted coup. The arrest, on January 8, 2022, of Karim Massimov, KNB chairman and long-time associate of Nazarbayev, indicated that the Kazakhstani security services were thought to have sided with the anti-Tokayev faction. In April 2023, Massimov was found guilty on charges of high treason, and he is currently serving an 18-year sentence in prison.

Finally, throughout the Qandy Qantar events, Tokayev revealed his anti-democratic credentials in full, as demonstrated by his infamous shot-to-kill order and the impunity granted to security forces involved in the events. The violence that erupted after January 4 resulted in an unconfirmed number of deaths, a few thousand citizens wounded, and over 10,000 arrested. In the aftermath of Qandy Qantar, the Tokayev regime systematically refused to engage with popular demands for justice from citizens who had been arbitrarily arrested, tortured, wounded, and the families of those killed in January 2022.

Politically, Qandy Qantar certified the end of presidential cohabitation. From January 2022 onward, the regime engaged in the thorough, if at times cosmetic, work of de-Nazarbayevification, removing members of the Nazarbayev family from top jobs, dismantling the cult of the personality of Elbasy and accelerating the ultimate departure of Nazarbayev from the political scene. As it exited one of the most dramatic junctures of its recent history, Kazakhstan returned to being ruled by one man only.

The Kazakhstani regime perceived de-Nazarbayevification as an opportunity to break from the past, and rapidly devised a propagandistic narrative centered on the idea of Jana Qazaqstan (Kazakh for “New Kazakhstan”) to present post-Qantar Kazakhstan. This narrative, which targeted with equal intensity domestic audiences and international observers, mimicked the propaganda devised in neighboring Uzbekistan after the death of its first president, Islam Karimov, in 2016.

 Karimov’s successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, presided over a process of authoritarian modernization – presented internationally under the umbrella of Yangi O‘zbekiston (Uzbek for “New Uzbekistan”) – that aimed at globalizing the Uzbek economy while maintaining a close watch over domestic political developments, which have remained firmly non-democratic since 2016. Kazakhstan’s own version of this rhetoric, as we will see below, remained for all intents and purposes opaque and poorly articulated. 

New Kazakhstan, ultimately, looks very much like old Kazakhstan. The rhetoric of change originally brought forward by Tokayev in his 2022 poslanie has not been translated into substantive policy. Kazakhstani politics have not developed in a new trajectory throughout 2022-23, when, perhaps not unexpectedly, we have witnessed the return of many strategies of authoritarian consolidation perfected in the Nazarbayev years. 

The persistence of Nazarbayevist traits in post-Qantar Kazakhstan emerges more visibly while looking at the processes whereby Tokayev secured his presidency in 2022-2023. In sequence, he presided over a constitutional referendum, held on June 5, 2022, that supposedly aimed to rebalance the power equation between the legislative and the executive branches of the government; erased the powers granted to Nazarbayev in 2019; and offered some opportunities for increased local representation via the introduction of direct election for akims in select villages. 

In September 2022, the Kazakhstani parliament approved a more consequential reform package that, in an ostensible act of de-Nazarbayevification, changed the name of the Kazakhstani capital back to Astana and, more importantly, extended presidential terms to seven years while introducing a one-term limit for future presidents. 

Tokayev was quick to capitalize on the new institutional framework set up by these reforms. The presidential election of November 20, 2022, sanctioned his re-election until 2029; the parliamentary vote held on March 19, 2023, redesigned the configuration of the Mazhilis in line with the agenda of the new regime. None of these votes was deemed free and fair by the OSCE or other Western observers. In another indicator suggesting that post-Qantar regime dynamics had indeed remained unchanged, constitutional tampering and uncompetitive elections came to characterize Kazakhstani politics in 2022-2023 just as they did throughout the Nazarbayev years.

The democratic deficit that affected pre-Qantar Kazakhstani politics has hence continued to define the domestic landscape five years on from Nazarbayev’s momentous withdrawal from the presidency. In a particularly worrying, and ongoing, trend, the government is focusing its repressive outlook on the Kazakhstani media landscape, by censoring the activity of independent media via legislative acts or forcing the periodic re-registration of non-state media operators. 

In 2024, moreover, Kazakhstani party politics remains a regime monopoly. The post-Qantar years saw a relaxation in the legislation regulating party registration, yet its application was exclusively limited to parties supporting the regime agenda. The competitive nature of the elections held in 2022-2023 was in this sense fictional; regime-friendly parties and candidates were allowed to participate in order to conceal the exclusion of independent movements and actors from the electoral competitions held in the post-Qantar years. In early 2024, five years after Nazarbayev had left power, Kazakhstani politics continues to be completely sanitized from opposition forces, which are not allowed to operate legally nor to participate in electoral competitions at the local or national level.

A marked degree of continuity has also characterized Tokayev’s post-Qantar economic strategy. The regime has persisted in centering the national economy on the exports of hydrocarbons, and oil in particular. Despite new opportunities arising from COP28, Kazakhstan does not seem to be ready for a post-oil world – despite the fact that its export activity is now operating in a significantly more volatile environment. Since 2022, in fact, the geopolitical repercussions of the war in Ukraine increased the risks associated with Kazakhstan’s oil exports, which are mostly carried out through Russia’s territory. Continuous delays in expanding the Tengiz field are also likely to limit Kazakhstan’s growth, which the IMF has predicted to stall at 3.1 percent year-on-year in 2024.

Failure to act decisively on economic diversification has obstructed any progress in addressing the economic grievances expressed by the population throughout the cohabitation years. There is evidence of ongoing tensions in the oil sector, with workers in Western Kazakhstan engaging in regular strike actions, while the government, in late November 2023, allowed for a further rise in LPG prices – the same measure that sparked the wave of protests of January 2022. Despite macroeconomic stabilization, post-Qantar Kazakhstan remains a very unequal country in which increasingly larger sectors of the population are experiencing declining living standards and are often prevented regular access to adequate social security protection. 

Against this already complex political and economic backdrop, Tokayev also had to respond to the unprecedented pressures exerted by the forced polarization of Eurasian geopolitics that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Navigating this perilous juncture, the Kazakhstani president opted for a line of equidistance from both the aggressor and its Western opponents, carving a supposedly safe space wherein Kazakhstan is not seen as part of Russia’s camp but has not openly denounced the invasion. This policy too, ultimately, seems to follow a playbook drawn in the Nazarbayev years, when Kazakhstan’s open preference for multivectoral engagement concealed the regime’s opportunistic intention to pursue multiple alliances at the same time.

The Kazakhstani transition, one of the most anticipated across the entire Asian political space, essentially returned a leadership that did not innovate on the political choices and the economic strategies consolidated throughout the Nazarbayev era. In 2024, five years on from the resignation of his first president and two years after one of the most dramatic weeks experienced by the country since independence, Kazakhstan is still led by an elderly man who heads an authoritarian, kleptocratic regime and presides over a struggling economy. 

Some things, it seems, never change.