Party's Over for Kazak President's Daughter

When the president’s daughter Dariga Nazarbaeva set up a new political party in Kazakstan nearly three years ago, critics dismissed it as merely a ploy to create the appearance of pluralism in Kazakstan. However, the Asar party went on to make tentative attempts to take a semi-independent line – and that seems to have spelled its rapid demise.



On July 4, the major pro-government party Otan held a congress, presided over by party leader and Kazak president Nursultan Nazarbaev, at which the merger with Asar was sealed. Dariga’s party had met the previous day and agreed the move.



President Nazarbaev was elected the head of new, bigger Otan, with Dariga joining Otan officials Bakhtyjan Jumagulov and Alexander Pavlov as deputy leader.



For some, the fact that there is now just one big party of power instead of two makes little real difference, but other analysts see the disappearance of Asar as a sign that President Nazarbaev has grown tired of his daughter's experiment with politics, and will not tolerate a grouping that looks like it could develop into an alternative force.



At the Otan meeting, Nazarbaev suggested that there were no substantial differences between the two groups. “I’ve often been asked by many people, if Otan and Asar have the same positions and both support the president’s policies, which of them should we vote for?



“I think that this question has now been eliminated.”



In public, Dariga Nazarbaeva took the demolition of her party with good grace. On June 19, she told Asar members of a proposal to unite all pro-presidential parties into a powerful new force “with which no other party will be able to compete in the next 50 years”.



Dosym Satpaev, director of the Risk Assessment Group, a Kazakstan-based think tank, is certain the merger was planned by the president alone, and that neither his daughter nor Otan leaders had much of a say in the matter.



Asar was developing into more than a mere satellite of the regime, and it is unclear why Dariga Nazarbaeva agreed to its dissolution, even to make way for some new super-party.



“It was Asar which joined the Otan party, not the other way around…. Dariga Nazarbaeva still had to pretend she completely supported this idea,” said Satpaev. “It’s possible that she still hopes she'll be able to acquire more power than the other deputy heads of the new party.”



One reason may be that the party failed to live up to its electoral hopes. At the party’s first conference in January 2004, Dariga predicted it would win half the 77 seats in the lower house of parliament, but in the general election in September that year, Asar came third after Otan and the opposition Ak Zhol party, and ended up with just four seats in the legislature.



But according to political analyst Gennady Sysoev, “Asar’s main crime was not that it achieved a poor political showing, but rather the reverse – that the ‘supreme judge’ believed it harboured excessively ambitious plans with aspirations to reach the very top.”



Asar was outspoken about government plans to introduce strict legislation allowing the authorities to muzzle any media organisation at will. In March 2005, Dariga said the draft law “does not match the legislation of any democratic nation or adhere to any international standards”. The bill finally went before parliament in May 2006.



In recent years, there have been many suggestions that Nazarbaev was grooming his daughter to succeed him, so Asar was regarded as a political vehicle that would make this option possible. As late as last summer, some analysts were still predicting there was a chance such a succession would be engineered in the December election – but it never happened.



Since the election, another trend has been evident in which President Nazarbaev is reasserting centralised control over key economic assets as well as political forces. In addition, says Satpaev, “The process can also be observed in the information sector, where control over certain media is being increased, and at the same time reducing the influence of the financial and industrial groups which own these media outlets. This applies Dariga Nazarbaeva’s group.”



Apart from pushing ahead with the unpopular media law, Culture and Information Minister Ermukhambet Ertysbaev has threatened to withdraw the license of the Commercial Television of Kazakstan, KTK, channel, and announced that the government plans to take control over the semi-privatised Khabar television channel. Dariga Nazarbaeva is reported to have interests in both TV stations.



Winding up Asar is part of the same process, only in the field of politics, Satpaev believes.



Amirjan Kosanov, head of the opposition Movement for a Fair Kazakstan, shares this view. “I think this merger was probably caused by concern among the president’s inner circle about the increased activity of certain financial and industrial groups, especially Dariga Nazarbaeva’s group.”



Nazarbaev’s decision to overhaul the party system also reflects what appears to be a shifting view of how his political power-base should be organised.



Over the years he has been in power as president of an independent Kazakstan, Nazarbaev has encouraged a succession of parties to establish themselves as the leading political force, only to allow them to crumble and replace them with a new favourite.



Otan has survived since 1999, but does not really act as a ruling party, since policy comes from Nazarbaev’s office and the government. This suggests he does not see a strong central party as essential to his rule.



The latest plan, as Dariga suggested, is to join up all the loyalist parties into one big one.



Apart from the now-defunct Asar, there are a number of smaller parties which look like likely candidates to dissolve into a new super-party –Rukhaniyat, and Democratic, Civil and Agrarian Parties. All of them, including Asar, formed a coalition with Otan to back Nazarbaev’s bid for re-election, which he sailed through last December with no real opposition.



With Otan’s half a million registered members and Asar’s 200,000, a complete merger including smaller groups could create a body of one million supporters. If that is the intention, it is hard to see how the lesser parties can resist the gravitational pull.



“Some will simply cease to exist. Those that are left will lose any independence,” said Sabit Jusupov, of the Kazakstan Institute for Socioeconomic Information and Forecasting. “So in this situation, they have just two options to go cap in hand to the united organisation, or to try to form a distinct centre of attraction themselves, which is much more difficult because it would take efforts and funds.”



Political analyst Sysoev said such a powerful party would “spare the head of state a lot of the anxieties he’s had in recent years, [so] he could happily rule over Kazakstan for several more terms”.



However, it is also possible a large monolithic organisation will begin fracturing along the lines of the various interest groups it represents.



“Any attempt to create a monster party representing the vast majority of the electorate is doomed, because this monster will be motley in composition and riven with internal conflicts,” said Pyotr Svoik, who heads the non-government Almaty Public Anti-Monopoly Commission.



Svoik believes Kazakstan needs multiple parties not least because society itself is still “unformed, loose, diverse and dissimilar”.



Where do these changes within the pro-presidential groups leave the political opposition?



Nazarbaev’s administration has successfully marginalised opposition parties by denying them political power and access to media, and in some cases by banning them outright.



Saken Salimov, an independent analyst, said the opposition are never visible in the media as things stand, and “once the pro-government parties have fully merged, the opposition will have almost no chance left to be heard”.



Satpaev is slightly less pessimistic, since he thinks the new Otan is likely to undergo convulsions even before other parties join it.



“The opposition has gained a more serious and dangerous opponent in the form of the new united party. This will further weaken their position,” he said. “But the opposition may nurture some hope that serious conflicts and disagreements may arise between Dariga and the other deputy leaders in the new united pro-presidential party.”



Gaziza Baituova is an IWPR contributor in Taraz.