KZBlog

Sorry for yesterday’s brief post. I got an important phone call in the middle of the President’s speech on TV about the referendum so I just posted the main piece of news: that he would not appeal the Constitutional Council’s decision. The other big news, which has already hit the domestic and international news services, is that he called for early Presidential elections. Elections should be held in December of 2012, but there are suggestions that now they will be held on the 1 May, which used to be Labor Day and is now called the Day of the Unity of People of Kazakhstan. If I remember correctly, presidential elections has not had a single Presidential election that was not held earlier than scheduled. Some analysts believe that early elections benefit the incumbents because opposition candidates and parties have less time to prepare their campaigns, whereas the incumbents are constantly in the public eye and covered in the media.

As to why the President decided not to appeal the Constitutional Council’s decision and not to try to extend his current term until 2020, rumors and speculation are rife. Some cite the riots in Tunisia (where the President had been in power since 1982) and Egypt. However many people seem to feel that Kazakhstan is not comparable to Tunisia. More likely, international pressure from major powers like the US, the EU and the OSCE played a role. While the press in Kazakhstan could criticize the US for its condemnation of the referendum, it would be hard for any one in power in Kazakhstan to criticize the OSCE, after so much time and energy was spent becoming head of the OSCE and then getting a summit held in Astana. Some note that even while welcoming Minister of Foreign Affairs Kanat Saudebayev to Washington, “Hilary Clinton emphasized the United States’s concern that the national referendum that would extend President Nazarbayev’s term of office to 2020 would be a setback for democracy, and we hope that Kazakhstan will renew its commitments to democracy, good governance, and human rights.” So perhaps Kazakhstan did not want to put up with 10 years of bad press and embarrassment for its officials who go abroad. Some of course say that the whole idea of the referendum may have been aimed at achieving just what it did achieve in the end: early elections

One angle that hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage is the candidacy of the leader of the Alga party, Vladimir Kozlov and the issue of ethnicity that it raised. Kozlov, who is an ethnic Russian, faced quite a bit of resistance to the idea of a president who is not Kazakh. Among other things, leaders of a movement called Zheltoksan 86 threw eggs at him in Novemeber and have been quite vocal in their opposition. The name Zheltoksan 86 (December 86 in Kazakh) refers to protests in 1986 against the appointing of an ethnic Russian, Kolbin, as head of the Kazakh SSR. It is possible that the proposal to do away with elections had to do with avoiding any further conflicts that might be linked to the touchy issue of a non-Kazakh running for President. The fact that the Alga party, which is unregistered, claims that it has been prevented from registering through bureaucratic resistance could also embarrass the government.

In any case, the western governments that had condemned the idea of a referendum have praised Nazarbayev for his decision to let elections stand and most, if not all, pro-democratic groups had to admit that the right decision was made in the end.

The President also made one excellent point that I have never heard raised in the debates on the various laws about the First President of Kazakhstan. He said that he worried about the precedent it would set for the future. I think this is a key point. We don’t know who the second or third or 15th President of Kazakhstan will be, and if we set up too strong a presidency (and this applies to any government agency), one wonders if future generations will be satisfied with less than the first president had. At the very least, we may be setting up expectations that Presidents stay in power for life and this is the norm. So establishing respect for the Constitution is an important guarantee of stability for the future.

The Russian transcript of Nazarbayev’s speech is already up on the Akorda website if you care to read it yourself. The speech was broadcast live at 5pm Monday on most domestic news channels.