Kazakhstan: Early Parliamentary Poll on the Cards

Mounting speculation that Kazakhstan will call an early parliamentary election was fuelled last week when an official from President Nursultan Nazarbayev's administration dropped heavy hints that a fresh vote is expected as the country gears up to assume the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2010.

In an interview with Liter newspaper published on June 11, presidential advisor Yermukhamet Yertysbayev said an early poll could be called in just over a year. "Since chairing the OSCE lies ahead for Kazakhstan and we intend to fulfill our obligations to the organization, I do not rule out early parliamentary elections in fall 2009," he said.

Yertysbayev left little doubt about the administration's motivations: a desire to revamp the country's one-party legislature before Kazakhstan takes the OSCE helm. "We have to come to Europe and show political pluralism in our country, represented in the country's highest representative legislative body," he said.

Analysts agree that the OSCE chairmanship has given an impetus for political reform. "Clearly the driver for another pre-term election is Kazakhstan's impending OSCE chairmanship for 2010," Rico Isaacs, a political scientist at the United Kingdom's Oxford Brookes University who specializes in Kazakhstan, told EurasiaNet. "While strictly speaking there were no conditions attached for Kazakhstan to hold the chairmanship, there was an informal agreement the Kazakh government would reform some of the more restrictive aspects of its political system."

Constitutional reform pledged by officials to liberalize the political environment includes an overhaul of laws governing elections, political parties and the media.

The current lower house of parliament has been the subject of virulent controversy since being voted in last August, when Nazarbayev's Nur Otan Party won every elected seat. Some are convinced that, aside from the damage to Kazakhstan's international image, Nazarbayev's administration has been unsettled by the consequences of having a one-party parliament in a state describing itself as a multi-party democracy.

"A unique new situation has now emerged, in which the authorities are imitating the political process and I think