Officials in Kazakhstan are working to solidify international backing for the country’s early presidential election on April 3. So far, Astana has found the international community to be generally supportive.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev announced the snap election back in late January, pushing up the voting date by almost two years. The move was framed as a response to a referendum petition by a citizen group that, in effect, sought to keep Nazarbayev in office until 2020.
Nurlan Ermekbayev, an advisor to Nazarbayev, who commented on the elections during a recent visit to Washington, characterized the snap presidential poll as a common-sense move, striking a balance between those forces favoring a referendum, and those who preferred to hold the election as scheduled in 2012. “The compromise was just in the middle,” Ermekbayev said.
Another reason to hold early elections, he added, was that Nazarbayev had already achieved his goals for the current term two years early. “The president – and parliament and the leadership – already fulfilled the tasks that were set for the presidential term of seven years,” Ermekbayev said.
Ermekbayev, a former deputy foreign minister, said the United States and European Union nations have been generally supportive of Astana's move.
“There's been a very positive decision to hold elections rather than a referendum,” he said. “Particularly with American officials, we had some meetings and they assessed it [the decision to hold early elections] very positively.” He added that the decision by international groups like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and International Republican Institute to send election observers proves that the vote is “legitimate.”
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had told Kazakhstan officials that proceeding with a referendum would have marked “a setback to democracy.” But Washington has not aired any public criticism of the plan to hold early elections. “We and the international community see these elections as an important opportunity to strengthen the electoral process,” said Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake during a congressional hearing in early March. State Department officials did not respond to a request for comment from EurasiaNet.org.
Ermekbayev said Kazakhstan’s democratization process since the country gained independence in 1991 had concentrated on economic issues, but added that officials in Astana are now ready to focus more on political reforms.
“The president's decision that the economic foundation [of Kazakhstan], the level of social and economic development, should be the right task and should be the basis for democratic reforms, … this has been proved to be correct, Ermekbayev said. He went on to say that other former Soviet states which initially placed greater emphasis on political, rather than economic changes had ended up experiencing bouts of “instability” that Kazakhstan has so far has managed to avoid.
“We have started the transformation from a presidential governance model to a presidential-parliamentary one,” he said, citing 2007 reforms that reduced the presidential term from seven to five years and reduced the number of members of parliament.
Kazakhstan’s last parliamentary vote in 2007, which came under criticism from Western observers, produced a legislature in which all the elected members came from the same, pro-presidential party.
Recent reforms increase the likelihood that after the next parliamentary elections in 2012, “we are sure we will get a multiparty parliament,” Ermekbayev said. “In general, the trend and intention is to improve the role and the power of the parliament, and maybe in the future to transition from the presidential-parliamentary to parliamentary-presidential, and maybe to parliamentary. But time will show us whether we can do it sooner or later.”
Ermekbayev also dismissed criticism that the snap election gave Nazarbayev an unfair advantage. The president, whose tenure at the helm in Kazakhstan pre-dates the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991, remains a genuinely popular political leader. “[Political] parties should always be ready to compete,” he said. “The majority cannot wait for the minority to get prepared.”
Joshua Kucera is a freelance writer who specializes in security issues. He is the author of EurasiaNet's Bug Pit blog.
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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