As has been the case with every election in Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet history, the election fell short of international standards. Tokayev received 71 percent of all votes cast amidst a reported voter turnout of 78 percent. The official results of the early presidential election held on June 9, 2019, offered no surprises. To this end, Tokayev’s power was severely curtailed, with Nazarbayev effectively retaining control over the entire security apparatus and remaining intimately involved in matters of state. It was an audacious attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, “to have one’s cake and eat it too.” You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Tooįor Kazakhstan’s power elite, the aftermath of President Islam Karimov’s unexpected passing in 2016 offered an ominous lesson about the price of failure to plan for and manage the transition process. If successful, Kazakhstan’s unique transition would secure the future of those who acquired great wealth and power during Nazarbayev’s long rule, including his family members, while avoiding the appearance of dynastic power transfer a la Azerbaijan. The unusual transition format of Kazakhstan’s political system and the resulting configuration represented a clear example of what Stephen Hall and Thomas Ambrosio describe as authoritarian learning in which regimes embrace survival strategies based on the successes and failures of other governments. Given the zero-sum nature of Kazakhstan’s patronage-based politics, any effort by Tokayev to strengthen his position and chart his own course was always going to lead to conflict with the very elites whose interests this transition was designed to safeguard. Nazarbayev reminded viewers of his special status as First President–Leader of the Nation ( Elbasy) and stated that he would retain his lifelong posts as chair of the Security Council, chair of the ruling Nur-Otan political party, and member of the Constitutional Council. Yet, as he continued reading his statement on television, it became clear that this was an unusual transition. In a 2016 interview with journalists from Bloomberg, then 76-year-old Nazarbayev asserted emphatically that he had made no plans to eventually transfer power to his children, stating that a dynastic transfer of power “was not for us.” In March 2019, Nazarbayev announced that he had reached a “difficult” decision and was going to step down from the presidency and that, in accordance with Kazakhstan’s constitution, the chair of the Senate, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, would succeed him as interim president until elections were held. Throughout his nearly three-decade rule of Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev has always been eager to project a positive image of himself in the international arena.
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