Kazakhstan: Election 2005: Kazakh President Pledges to Continue Political Reforms After Landslide Victory

Fourteen Years and Still Counting

In his first press conference since Kazakhstan's Central Election Commission (CEC) confirmed that he had won a landslide victory in yesterday's (4 December) president elections, incumbent leader Nursultan Nazarbayev promised to dedicate his seven-year term to accelerating political reform in the country. Official results from the CEC give President Nazarbayev some 91.01% of the vote, an overwhelming victory, meaning that according to the constitution, having led the country since independence in 1991, Nazarbayev will have governed the country for 21 years before he is subject to another challenge. With the opposition fragmented and divided following a major split within the Ak Zhol (Bright Path) party earlier this year, and enjoying control over vast administrative resources which were mobilised for his election campaign, Nazarbayev was always assured of an easy victory.

Indeed, so assured was Nazarbayev of victory, that midway through the election campaign he had begun to urge the authorities in the regions to refrain from their attacks on the opposition, preferring to woo the electorate by focusing on the stability that his stewardship of the country has brought the country. Following a nuanced foreign policy, balancing Kazakhstan's interests with those of the United States, Russia and China, Nazarbayev has skilfully managed to exploit the country's oil wealth, transforming the economy from a situation where its own national interests in controlling the development of its natural resources were subject to foreign interests, to the point where Kazakhstan has recently joined the elite club of being a 1 million barrel/day producer and exporter, supplying the United States and Europe via the recently opened Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline on the one hand while continuing to expand its energy ties with China on the other, recently giving the green light to China National Petroleum Corp.'s (CNPC) US$4.18-billion takeover of PetroKazakhstan, the Canadian-owned oil company which has all of its operations in Kazakhstan. With GDP growth rates surpassing 9% over the past three years - which Global Insight forecasts will remain at 8.9% for the next two years, before slipping back marginally to 8.8% in 2008 - President Nazarbayev has focused on the country's booming economy in an effort to generate public support, pledging to double average monthly income by 2012 to around US$522, declaring that the state will guarantee similar increases for pensioners and students.

A result opinion poll suggested that he enjoyed support in the region of 70-80% for the vast majority of the election campaign, but the overwhelming nature of the victory has left Nazarbayev open to accusations of electoral fraud (see Kazakhstan: 2 December 2005: Election 2005: President Set for Landslide in Kazakh Election as Opponents Fail to Make Impact). Aidos Sarimov, spokesperson for main opposition candidate Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, a former ally of Nazarbayev claimed that 'there were multiple violations of the law', telling reporters that the opposition intended to 'use all potential, possible legal mechanisms to protest these violations'. The international monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who have never delivered a favourable verdict on any election in Kazakhstan, concur with the opposition and have already slammed the conduct of the election in their preliminary statement into the election. While the OSCE said that some administrative improvements were made when compared with previous elections, 'undue restrictions on campaigning, harassment of campaign staff and persistent and numerous cases of intimidation by the authorities, limited the possibility for a meaningful competition'.

Outlook and Implications

As the emerging world oil power, seeking to catapult itself into the top five world oil producers with a goal of 3.5 million barrels a day in output by 2015, Russia, China and the United States are keen to promote stability in the Central Asian country. Following the upheavals of the so-called 'coloured revolutions' in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan over the past two years, the United States has recently retreated from its policy of democratisation in the region as President Nazarbayev displayed signs that if the U.S. administration were to continue openly pressurising the Kazakh government to promote democratic reform, then Kazakhstan would move firmly into Russia and China's orbit. In a visit to Kazakhstan in October 2005, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signalled that the United States had no intention of undermining the current regime.

Nevertheless, the result and the OSCE's condemnation is something of an embarrassment to Nazarbayev. The Kazakh president regards himself as a benign dictator, similar to the enlightened despots of 18th century Europe, and is not keen to be associated with the excesses of his neighbours in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. While Nazarbayev has essentially rejected the notion that economic development and liberalisation must run parallel with the pursuance of democracy, there is nothing to suggest that he is against implementing gradual political reform and accelerating the pace of cadre change when economic conditions dictate confronting endemic corruption. This endemic corruption not only eventually threatens to hamper the country's economic development, but also will undermine the political stability of the country, especially if the country's emerging entrepreneurial classes come to believe that they would be better off if they removed Nazarbayev and the ruling clan. While Nazarbayev himself may have wanted a 'fair and free election' which he would have undoubtedly won, local election officials, keen to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime, have severely undermined Nazarbayev's hopes of chairing the OSCE in 2009, which would have been a major symbolic victory for Nazarbayev in his attempts to showcase Kazakhstan as an emerging economic and democratic force.

Having pledged to uphold his promise to promote political reform, the next litmus test for President Nazarbayev will be whether he is willing to change his team around and promote some younger, more reform-minded individuals from the government. There has been speculation that he may be willing at some point to promote some figures from his daughter's Asar party, which was specifically established to appeal to the younger, entrepreneurial classes as well as lower income families. The poor result for the opposition have given them little leverage to press Nazarbayev, so it is left to the international community to cajole the Kazakh president.