Kazakhstan’s presidential election on April 3 is set to be a non-event as incumbent leader Nursultan Nazarbayev breezes back into office. Analysts predict he’ll get well over 90 percent of the vote. Campaigning, which begins on March 3, also looks set to be a dull affair in the absence of any real opposition challengers.
Most of those standing against Nazarbayev are stalking horses, but one of them has decided to liven up the proceedings by first demanding that the president give him $100 million, and then dropping out of the race in a huff – or at least the pretense of one.
Zhaksybay Bazilbayev, a little-known anti-corruption campaigner, is most famous for standing against Nazarbayev in elections in 1999 and 2005 but dropping out ahead of the vote to call on his supporters to back the incumbent. In this election, however, he decided Nazarbayev owed him a favor in return – in fact, Bazilbayev claimed the president owed him $100 million for giving Nazarbayev a clear run for the top job on two previous occasions, the Gazeta.kz media portal reported.
The presidential administration, Akorda, failed to respond to Bazilbayev’s appeals, so on March 1 he went public, asking for his money back – and threatening to step down from the race unless Nazarbayev did.
In the end, it was Bazilbayev who dropped out of the election later in the day, leaving behind the nasty taste of a show staged to create some excitement over an election with a foregone conclusion.
Another candidate, tour agency operator Kanat Turageldiyev, didn’t help the democratic image of the country by standing down the same day, with RIA Novosti quoting him as saying he’d decided to back – guess who? – Nazarbayev.
The incumbent president won’t be campaigning, he said in an interview broadcast on state TV on February 28. The Leader of the Nation declared that he’d already set out his vision for Kazakhstan in his state-of-the-nation address last month. In any case, the president added, he already knows how popular he is from the number of people who put their signatures to a recent bid to stage a referendum to keep him in office until 2020.
Nazarbayev (who’s been in office for two decades or so) also repeated his view that the election is a “happy medium” between satisfying his people’s yearning to keep him in power and maintaining democratic standards (or, critics say, a veneer of them). Genuine opposition parties are boycotting the vote and there are rumors that this move is causing a few headaches in the Akorda, which wants a high turnout as proof of the president’s popularity. Not surprising, then, that Nazarbayev made sure to use his TV interview to urge people to get out and cast their vote in favor of stability.
Joanna Lillis is a journalist based in Almaty and author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan.
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