Campaign starts for ‘preordained’ Kazakh polls

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ASTANA – The campaign started Thursday for Kazakhstan’s presidential election with a victory by strongman President Nursultan Nazarbayev so certain he has decided not even to bother campaigning. Nazarbayev, whose rule over Kazakhstan dates to before its independence from the Soviet Union, faces a challenge from only three relatively obscure candidates in the April 3 polls.
The president called the snap elections after scrapping a plan to hold a referendum on extending his term until 2020 that sparked an uproar in the West. But the polls may not easily impress Western observers. Twenty-two candidates planned to stand in the polls but half of them fell at the hurdle of a Kazakh language exam which Nazarbayev breezed through but which opponents complained was needlessly tough.
Out of the 11 candidates who got the right Kazakh language grades, only four then mustered the 91,000 signatures needed to be registered as candidates. “In a situation where the election is taking place practically without any choice, where the victor is already preordained, election campaigning is going to play no role,” said political analyst Dosym Satpayev.
Nazarbayev appears confident in a crushing victory, unsurprisingly given that a petition for a referendum on him staying in power until 2020 mustered five million signatures, a third of the entire population. “I am not going to hold official pre-election events,” he said.
“I feel the support of the five million Kazakhs who signed the petition. I am grateful to Kazakhs for supporting my candidacy as president for a new term.” Nazarbayev’s opponents in the election are Patriots Party leader Gany Kasymov, Mels Eleusizov from the Tabigat ecologists party and Communist Zhambyl Akhmetbekov.
Kazakhstan’s main opposition party Azat is boycotting the polls, saying the snap elections have failed to give Nazarbayev’s opponents enough time to prepare for a serious campaign. Along with Uzbek President Islam Karimov, who rose to power at the same time, Nazarbayev is the longest-serving leader in the former Soviet Union.