Elections in Kazakhstan – No choice
Democracy in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is a managed affair, without clear rules of succession. Ever since communist bosses morphed into democrats after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, they have polished a veneer of democracy. It means staging elections from time to time. It does not mean that votes are fair or that power changes hands.
Presidential elections in Kazakhstan this spring returned Nursultan Nazarbayev for a new five-year term. He was first appointed to head the Soviet republic in June 1989. When the Soviet Union disintegrated two years later, he reluctantly declared independence. Since then, he has built up a personality-driven regime not unlike the one in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Rather than creating institutions to ensure a smooth political succession, he gives the impression of wanting to rule forever. He treats elections as carefully managed ceremonies to legitimise his reign. Yet he is now in his mid-70s, and his health is the subject of persistent rumours.
Mr Nazarbayev bans genuine opposition, running against puppet candidates. He has manipulated his country’s constitution and hardly bothers to campaign. He staged a show on April 26th and won with 90% of the vote again. Mr Nazarbayev is enshrined in Kazakhstan’s constitution as “leader of the nation”. He alone is allowed by law to stand indefinitely. He was not due to face voters until late in 2016. But, as he has done for every election since independence, he moved the date forward. The fawning state media explained that the 74-year-old was responding to spontaneous outpourings of affection from fans demanding an early poll. The point of elections in Kazakhstan is not to contest ideas but to “demonstrate overwhelming support for the leader”.
Kazakhstan’s president does not play fair. His courts lock up opposition figures on spurious charges. Hostile media outlets are shut down. And there is no proper opposition—indeed, one of the candidates running against Mr Nazarbayev in 2011 admitted that he had voted for him. Yet Mr Nazarbayev is genuinely popular, and despite Kazakhstan’s problems, he has overseen an economy that is a model of prosperity compared with the basket cases elsewhere in Central Asia.
Mr Nazarbayev once called his rule an “enlightened dictatorship”. The state spends fortunes on flattering his and his country’s image abroad. For years he was assumed to be grooming fabulously wealthy children to take over one day. Rakhat Aliyev was a spook turned ruthless businessman who was married to the president’s daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, before an almighty falling-out with the ruling family. In February he was found dead in his prison cell in Austria, where he was part of a murder investigation. His death could clear the way for Ms Nazarbayeva, who is head of her father’s party in parliament, to pitch either herself or her 30-year-old son, the deputy mayor of the capital, Astana, into the top spot. But no one knows for sure. Cliffhangers are great in soap operas, but lousy in the last reel of Kazakhstan’s politics.

Kazakhstan’s tanking economy
Jan 30th 2016 ECONOMIST

Not long ago it all looked so much better: oil prices were high, the middle classes were growing and the autocrat-father of the state, Nursultan Nazarbayev, presided over 17m grateful subjects. Yet today the situation in Kazakhstan looks more troubling than at any time since the country broke free of the Soviet Union to become, against the odds, Central Asia’s most prosperous state. To many, Mr Nazarbayev’s promise of a “Kazakh dream” now seems like a sick joke.

An overreliance on oil is what makes the Kazakh economy so fragile. Since the price crashed, export revenues have tumbled. The currency, the tenge, has fallen by half since August. That has squeezed wages and savaged household consumption. An economy that grew by over 5% in 2013 may contract this year, for the first time since 1998. It has not helped that growth is stalling in China, Kazakhstan’s second largest trading partner, while Russia, its largest, is now deep in recession.

All this is hurting ordinary folk. In a rare protest in a closely controlled state, two dozen homeowners gathered outside a bank in Almaty, the commercial capital, last week. They were complaining about their mortgages, and they are unlikely to be the last to do so. Many mortgages are denominated in dollars, so the cost of servicing them has soared.

The government is dealing with the financial crunch with an odd mix of stimulus and austerity. On the stimulus side is a $9-billion investment package to boost non-oil sectors such as manufacturing, as well as perks for foreign investors as a fire sale of state assets gets under way. Public-sector salaries and pensions have been raised, and schemes introduced to help savers and mortgage holders suffering from the currency’s fall.
As for austerity, public spending is to be cut in other areas, though in ways supposed to protect the worst-off. Even a swords-and-stallions TV drama about Kazakh history, intended to create a nobler and more accurate image of Kazakhstan than “Borat”, has lost some of its state funding. The budget deficit is likely to balloon despite some help from the sovereign wealth fund.

As grievances mount, political stability comes into question. The president keeps chanting an all-in-it-together mantra, but the calls for austerity by this head of a fabulously wealthy clan may wear thin. The question is how he might react to signs of greater dissatisfaction. Mr Nazarbayev has run Kazakhstan since before the Soviet Union collapsed, wielding a very personal sort of power even as international statesmen and highly paid public-relations firms have helped to polish a veneer of liberalism and democracy. Last year Mr Nazarbayev promised a “modern state apparatus”, and in the past he has talked of creating a resilient political system. But current conditions can hardly seem to him an opportune time for political change. There has been no move towards proper reform.

Meanwhile, the regime has kept a heavy lid on dissent ever since dozens of striking oil workers were gunned down by security forces in Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan in late 2011. An opposition leader, Vladimir Kozlov, is in jail on trumped-up charges of fomenting that turmoil, which prompted a massive crackdown on the political opposition and independent media. Last week two dissidents were jailed on spurious charges of inciting racial hatred, following a Kafkaesque trial sparked by a discussion on Facebook about an unpublished book written two decades ago.

“Presidents come and go,” one of those dissidents, Serikzhan Mambetalin, said during his spirited defence, “But the people remain.” Tell that to Mr Nazarbayev. He turns 76 in July, but shows no sign of going. Not least—and this spells trouble for the future—he has signally failed to provide for his succession.

Meanwhile, though Mr Nazarbayev would probably win anyway if presidential elections were free and fair, he takes no chances. He won the last election with 98% of the vote; in the past even other presidential candidates voted for the father of the state. In late January Mr Nazarbayev set a date of March 20th for parliamentary elections. Supposedly, they are in order to provide a fresh mandate to boost growth. In practice they will produce another rubber-stamp legislature to do the president’s bidding. However stage-managed the elections, they may fail to mask the cracks likely to emerge as the economy slows.

The president of Kazakhstan throws himself a modest birthday bash – As he turns 78, the showpiece capital he built turns 20