Kazak Election: Too Good to be True?

Nursultan Nazarbaev’s re-election as president of Kazakstan appears to reflect a desire by many voters to go for the safest bet, but opposition leaders are deriding his massive win as unbelievable.



Preliminary results released the day after the December 4 poll showed Nazarbaev with 91 per cent of the vote, 6.1 million votes in all. The head of the Central Electoral Commission, Onalsyn Jumabekov, officially announced that Nazarbaev had won.



The incumbent’s most serious rival, Zharmakhan Tuyakbay, a former speaker of parliament and now leader of the opposition alliance For a Fair Kazakstan, got just 6.6 per cent of the vote.



The leader of the opposition Ak Jol party, Alikhan Baimenov, came in third place with 1.65 per cent of the vote, People’s Communist Party leader Erasyl Abylkasymov got 0.38 per cent, and Mels Eleusizov, who heads the Tabigat ecology group, received 0.32 per cent.



The election passed off calmly, with the authorities doing their best to make it a festive occasion. In the second city and former capital Almaty, polling stations were decorated with flowers, balloons and bunting, and some had musicians to entertain the voters.



The mood contrasted with the scares that swept the city in the days leading up to the election. Fears of unrest led to panic-buying of food supplies, while the day before the vote there were stories of gunfire at a city market, a robbery at a large supermarket, and cars set alight in the streets. None of it proved to be true.



Speaking the day after the election, Nazarbaev told supporters, “The people have voted for unity and accord, and for the future of our country. I am certain it is a victory for the people of Kazakstan, who gave a positive appraisal to the work I’ve done over 14 years of independence.”



His campaign spokesman, Arman Shuraev, told IWPR, “This is a clear victory for Nazarbaev. I agree that conditions for the candidates were unequal, but that was because our candidate has no equal.”



Referring to predictions made by some observers that Kazakstan might go the way of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, with election-related popular unrest leading to regime change, Shuraev said, “Kazakstan has won because it has put an end to all these orange revolutions. The people proved smarter than the political strategists, and had the wisdom to show that shooting, disturbances and instability are unnecessary.”



Opposition figures believe the election was rigged.



“The results are the logical conclusion to an election campaign which was accompanied throughout by widespread violations of the constitution and the law, committed by the regime. President Nazarbaev and his entourage were unable even to create the illusion of a free and fair election,” said Tuyakbay.



The 91 per cent victory recorded by the president evoked only “laughter and a sense of the absurd”, according to Tuyakbay.



The candidate said his supporters had recorded “thousands” of violations of the rules on election day, and the conclusion was that the outcome was “fabricated to a serious degree”.



“The Movement for a Fair Kazakstan intends to use constitutional means and opportunities to seek a restoration of justice and demand that the election result be overturned,” he added.



Asked whether this meant street protests, Tuyakbay said, “We have the capacity to send thousands of supporters into the streets, but after the fuss that the authorities made about possible disturbances, we decided to hold in reserve our right to such actions, depending on the political situation.”



Protest actions are banned for a ten-day period following elections, according to Kazak law.



A team of 460 election monitors sent by the OSCE listed a number of areas where the election was unfair. “Despite some improvements in the election administration prior to election day, the [vote] did not meet a number of OSCE commitments and other international standards for democratic elections,” said a statement by the observers.



“While candidate registration was mostly inclusive and gave voters a choice, undue restrictions on campaigning, harassment of campaign staff and persistent and numerous cases of intimidation by the authorities limited the possibility for a meaningful competition.”



Many of the people whom IWPR interviewed on the streets of Almaty said they had voted for Nazarbaev, because they knew what they were getting and they feared the kind of instability they had seen in other countries. However, they differed in how much they were actively supportive of the president.



“I voted for the current president - I believe in him,” said Nurlan Smagulov, president of the Astana Motors company. “We have also witnessed the negative example of all these ‘colour revolutions’, and no way do we want this to be repeated on our streets.”



School teacher Anara Jubanova took a similar line, saying she chose the president because he was such a reliable and familiar figure. “We don’t need revolutionary upheavals,” she said. “I am in favour of peace and stability.”



Housewife Raisa Stepkina simply chose what she calls the “lesser evil”. “We have lived under him for 14 years, and we will go on doing so,” she added.



Observers say popular anxieties about instability, fuelled by deliberate scare tactics, helped secure the president a hefty proportion of the vote.



“The negative propaganda about the revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, where the impression was given that these countries had been thrown back decades, that there was chaos, disorder and violence there, naturally affected the frame of mind of Kazakstan citizens. They took notice of it, and voted for the current president,” said opposition journalist Sergei Duvanov.



Duvanov added, “Yet I think that he would have received 60 or 70 per cent anyway if the process had been honest and fair.”



Yevgeny Zhovtis, director of the Kazakstan Bureau for Human Rights, noted the negative role played by some media, “Voters were constantly indoctrinated through the media of Kazakstan and Russia, to the effect that orange revolutions must not be allowed [and] that no change at all is better than destabilisation.”



Zhovtis believes that the rumours of imminent unrest were part of the same strategy, “Voters were first disorientated, second intimidated, and third, deprived of information about what the opposition wanted.”



He thinks the opposition was never given a chance to compete on equal terms.



“Over the last five or six years there has been considerable pressure on the opposition… A number of opposition leaders have faced criminal charges, some were sentenced, and opposition parties had problems with registering and working in the country,” he said. “So by time the presidential election year came round, the opposition was already in an unequal position compared with the current president.”



Baurjan Tleusenov is a pseudonym for an IWPR contributor in Almaty.