ASTANA – Kazakhstan’s strongman President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Friday rejected the idea of extending his term until 2020 through a national referendum that has been flatly denounced by the United States.
The country’s first and only post-Soviet leader did not explain why he was overruling his entire political and business elite in a decision that received almost no attention from state media outlets.
The three-sentence presidential decree said only that Nazarbayev – who already holds the status of “leader of the nation” (Elbasy) – had decided “to reject a motion by the parliament of Kazakhstan” to hold the vote.
The referendum idea emerged unexpectedly last month on the initiative of a little-known rector of a university in the city of Semipalatinsk and was then quickly backed by both branches of parliament.
But it was not clear what stood behind the motion as it gathered momentum and received increasingly broad play on TV. State reports said that 3.1 million of the nation’s 16 million citizens had already signed the referendum petition.
The 70-year-old Nazarbayev has ruled the resource-rich former Soviet nation since 1989 and his supremacy has never been truly challenged. The Kazakh parliament has already changed the constitution to allow him to run for re-election as many times as he chooses and he was expected to easily win votes scheduled for 2012 and 2017.
Some analysts suggested that the idea was made only so that Nazarbayev could reject it in a bid to improve his lagging democratic credentials in the West. His refusal to support the referendum came only three days after the US embassy in Kazakhstan slammed the idea in an unusually strongly worded statement as a “setback for democracy.”
“We believe a national referendum that would replace the presidential elections guaranteed by Kazakhstan’s constitution would be a setback for democracy in Kazakhstan,” the embassy said in the statement.
“We think that it is important that Kazakhstan’s government and citizens honour their international commitments and continue to strive for free and fair elections,” the statement added. The United States has fostered close ties with Kazakhstan despite periodic criticism of a nation that is strategically close to Afghanistan and is an important supplier of both oil and uranium.
Kazakhstan has been viewed as an island of political stability in a region where ethnic politics dominate and which has already seen violence in both neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Yet much of the resulting positive investment climate is based on the assumption that Nazarbayev will either remain in office or be able to arrange a smooth transition to someone within his ruling clan. That transition however is yet to materialise and some analysts suggested that the ruling authorities were growing anxious and trying to force Nazarbayev’s hand.
“A referendum assumes that there are no other candidates,” said Kazakh political analyst Eduard Politayev.
The analyst said the move would have allowed Nazarbayev to groom a successor without risking any of the political tensions that have accompanied recent elections in former Soviet republic with long-standing leaders such as Belarus. “But it was obvious that Nazarbayev was going to reject this,” Politayev added. “He has always publicly said that he does not want a cult of personality around him.”
