National Security Professor Reflects on Election Observation Mission in Kazakhstan

My recent trip to Kazakhstan to observe a snap presidential election as part of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)/ODIHR election observation mission was an experience like no other. This was the largest OSCE mission in which I have participated so far; I was one of approximately 300 short-term observers from 35 (out of 57) OSCE participating States. It was also the farthest I have traveled for such a mission: two days of travel, eleven time zones away.

Kazakhstan’s president Kasym-Jomart Tokayev, in office since June 2019, called for a snap presidential election in September, giving the country (and the observers) only approximately a month to prepare. The snap election was announced in response to the country’s rapidly deteriorating political and economic crises triggered by deadly anti-government protests in Kazakhstan in January and exacerbated by regional instability due to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Challenged only by five little-known, but government-approved opponents, Tokayev won reelection in a landslide, with 81.31 percent of the votes. Voters' second most popular choice (but still less than 6 percent) was "Against Everyone," an option that appeared on a ballot for the first time in Kazakhstan’s history. Based on the aggregate reports from a multinational team of observers and analysts on the ground, the OSCE concluded that “while election day was calm and voting procedures were largely followed, important safeguards were disregarded and substantial procedural errors and omissions were observed during counting and tabulation, undermining transparency.”

I will defer to the OSCE’s official statement for any evaluative comments concerning the electoral process itself, but for my part I will note the festive atmosphere we observed at all polling stations, as if punctuating a “theater of elections.” There was loud music blasting outside most polling stations; many stations were decorated with balloons and served tea, coffee, sweets, and baked goods inside and outside. Some election officials wore traditional ethnic costumes. As voters entered polling stations, election committee members would greet them with the cheerful “S Prazdnikom!” (roughly translated from Russian as “Happy Holidays!”) – a greeting we, the observers, quickly added to our arsenal of pleasantries, much to hour hosts’ delight, as we moved from station to station.

Even if the election’s results appeared pre-ordained and unsurprising, the OSCE’s diligent and persistent efforts in enforcing electoral law and cultivating a culture of transparency are still important in creating muscle memory in Kazakhstan’s institutional building. Besides, a great deal of essential cross-cultural learning happens in daily interactions between OSCE observers, analysts, local staff, and average citizens. These interactions contribute to important knowledge and skills transfers between the observers and the host nation. As observers, we hope we can make, even if small, a contribution to promoting more transparent democratic processes, which will serve the majority of the residents, not only business and political elites.

Kazakhstan’s vastness

Despite its centralized government structure and a lack of “genuine competitive nature,” Kazakhstan, the ninth largest country in the world (and one that is bigger than Western Europe) is very diverse ethnically, linguistically, and politically. Depending on which region of Kazakhstan our election observers deployed to, their experiences and impressions varied greatly.

My team’s assigned area of observation (AoO) was the Aktobe region, in western Kazakhstan. As most of west Kazakhstan lies in a steppe, fierce year-round winds are definitive of the region. In late November, the wind, coupled with snow, made for a rather cold visit, but driving through snowy white fields that blended with the sky was thrillingly beautiful. Most villages we visited were rather sparsely populated, with only one polling station per village. Many villages did not have asphalted roads (as we learned the hard way). However, what impressed me was that even the poorest villages had robust natural gas heating infrastructure (approximately 95 percent of Kazakhstan's natural gas reserves are located in its western regions). At the same time, many residents in northern, central, and southern Kazakhstan still do not have access to network gas due to insufficiently developed domestic pipeline systems. As a result, despite large natural gas reserves of their own, Kazakhstan relies on gas imports from Russia and Uzbekistan to meet all domestic demand.

The only other region I had a chance to visit on this mission was the capital city, Astana. I couldn’t help but agree with Fraser and Kim's 2015 description of Astana as “one of the strangest capital cities on Earth.” Built only 25 years ago, in the middle of an empty patch of land by the Ishim River, Astana’s “flashy buildings” “rise up implausibly from the flat plains of oil-rich Kazakhstan to form a city stuck between a Soviet past and an aspirational present.” In 2019, in one of his first moves as president, Tokayev renamed Astana into Nur-Sultan in honor of his longest-serving, Russia-backed predecessor Nursultan Nazarbayev. Three years later, Tokayev reversed his decision and reinstated the capital's name to Astana in desperate attempts to break with the toxic legacy of his authoritarian predecessor. However, despite the name change, Astana still seems to embody Nursultan Nazarbayev’s personality cult built over five successive terms.

Those of my fellow observers who deployed to southern parts of Kazakhstan experienced a completely different climate and culture: warm and sunny, southern regions of Kazakhstan are permeated with sites of ancient settlements, fortresses, and other cultural landmarks and artifacts that survived Soviet “cultural homogenization.” I also wished I could have traveled to Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city and former capital, known not only for its beautiful mountainous views and vibrancy, but also for its distinct political activism. Almaty became the scene of the deadliest clashes between the Kazakh riot police and protesters in January. Despite being president Tokayev’s hometown, Almaty had the lowest voter turnout in the snap presidential election on November 20 – approximately 30 percent – further signaling people’s defiance of the current government and the election’s preordained outcome.

Legacy of the anti-government protests

The anti-government protests that broke out in Kazakhstan in January and quickly turned violent were in no small measure a turning point in the country’s history. Protests initially broke out against increases in the price of liquefied petroleum gas, which most Kazakhs use as car fuel, but soon spread across the country and evolved to a wider range of grievances. In response to the protests, the Kazakh government shut down the internet and dispatched riot police across the country to suppress the movement. With the help of Moscow-led “peacekeeping” forces, the protests were eventually violently quashed, leaving more than 230 people dead and thousands arrested, tortured and jailed.

During our election observation mission, we drove through many signal dead zones, requiring us to use print maps. Our local staff shared that the experience triggered traumatizing memories of the January protests when the government shut down phone and internet connection to prevent further people mobilization. The fears of being disconnected and unable to reach family and friends still resonated strongly in people’s memories. At one polling station, a group of unusually vocal local observers shared gruesome stories of torture experienced by people they knew. It was clear that while people didn’t want the resurgence of violence, their trust in the current government was fundamentally ruptured.

In response to the violent protests, president Tokayev signaled a willingness to make concessions. He removed former president Nursultan Nazarbayev from his security council post, repealed the former president’s and his family’s immunity from prosecution, changed the capital's name from Nur-Sultan back to its previous name, Astana, and introduced several measures limiting presidential powers. However, none of those measures were perceived as genuine efforts to break from the authoritarian tradition. On the contrary, Tokayev’s proposal to limit the presidency to a single seven-year term (passed in a June referendum and voted into law in September) has now secured the newly reelected 69-year old’s grasp on power until 2029.

Kazakhstan’s ties with Russia

Russia remains Kazakhstan’s most important regional partner and influencer. The Russian language enjoys the status of an official language, despite Kazakh being the only national (state) language. From my limited observations, both the Russian and the Kazakh languages were equally in use in both formal and informal settings. In certain contexts, the Russian language seemed a preferred language of business and communication. For example, many restaurants, even in the capital city, only had menus in the Russian language, and none in the Kazakh language, let alone English. Service sector representatives spoke mostly Russian, both with guests and among themselves.

Kazakhstan’s historical ties to Russia are in many ways a product of Russia’s centuries-old imperial legacy in the region – imperial in that it depended on Russia’s “conquest and domination” of Central Asian lands (Mankoff, 2022, Empires of Eurasia, p.69). The Soviet leaders continued the colonization of Central Asia not only by means of economic and political exploitation, but also by “extensive campaigns of cultural transformation” focused on “denomadization” and “de-islamization” of predominantly Muslim Central Asian republics, as well as the imposition of the Russian language in all spheres of life.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia pursued new forms of integration of Central Asian countries into a greater Eurasia project as a counterweight to the Euro-Atlantic regional order. Thus, Kazakhstan became a key member in two main Moscow-led regional institutions: the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a military alliance consisting of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan; and the Eurasian Economic Union with Russia, Belarus, Armenia, and Kazakhstan as its members. These organizations rely on institutional, economic, and political linkages held over from the Soviet era, including the dominance of Russian media outlets and the role of Russian speaking, often Russian educated elites (Mankoff, 2022, Empires of Eurasia, p.72).

Kazakhstan's response to Russia's war against Ukraine

Since Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, all Central Asian states, including Kazakhstan – arguably Russia’s most important partner – have been distancing themselves from Russia. Thus, Kazakhstan’s president Tokayev has openly declined to recognize the Russia-created breakaway "republics" in Ukraine; refused to help Russia evade sanctions; and denied Russia’s request for additional manpower to aid the Russian military offensive in Ukraine. Tokayev also welcomed hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing Putin’s conscription orders in September. At the time when other countries were closing their borders to fleeing Russian males (and Moscow tightened control of the border), Tokayev opened the borders and called on Kazaks to welcome them and ensure their security.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has also significantly undermined Russia’s image and credibility in the eyes of average Kazakhs, аs well as people across Central Asia, putting additional pressures on their respective governments. According to research by Karlygash Ezhenova, a Kazakh journalist and political analyst, approximately 60 percent of Kazakhs want friendly relations with Russia, but among people under 35 years old, 82 percent want to be friends with the West. Our conversations with people at polling stations certainly matched these statistics.

Indeed, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has reawakened the Kazakh people’s concerns that Moscow may attempt to execute a similar scenario in the north of the country, home to about three million ethnic Russians. These fears are exacerbated by a collective historical memory of traumas inflicted by the Soviet policy of collectivization, which sparked a famine killing a third of Kazakhs in the 1930s.

However, despite Tokayev’s pre-election campaign of distancing from Russia, his first post-election trip was to meet none other than Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, ostensibly to reaffirm bilateral ties and commitments, including military technical cooperation. Immediately following a visit with Putin, Tokayev flew to Paris to meet French president Emmanuel Macron to discuss deepening economic, energy, and educational ties. It was the first visit by a Kazakh leader in seven years. Tokayev’s diplomatic engagements seem to signal the Kazakh leader’s ambitions to maintain a multi-vector foreign policy, balancing between Russia and the West, in an attempt to extract maximum economic and political gain from both, without fully committing to either.

Looking ahead

Maintaining a multi-vector foreign policy at a time of historically high tensions between Russia and the West is a tall order, but Tokayev seems keen to make the most of his seven years in office.

It is unclear how successful this balancing act will be, but one thing that does seem likely is that Kazakhstan’s attempts to distance itself from Russia will be growing, especially in the context of increasing pains from international sanctions, a global shift away from fossil fuels, and Russia’s deepening political isolation. With time, Kazakhstan’s geopolitical departure from Russia might lead to a new regional realignment with China and Turkey as new centers of gravity.

In light of these dynamics, the U.S. would be prudent to capitalize on this momentum and engage with Kazakhstan not only through international organizations, such as the OSCE, but in a more bilateral manner.

Rich in natural resources, and lying at the intersection of Europe and Asia, Kazakhstan is poised to leverage its resources, location, and size to the fullest. And it has consistently been signaling economic openness to the West. For example, when hundreds of Western companies left Russia in protest to the war in Ukraine, the Kazakh government successfully wooed them to relocate to Kazakhstan instead.

In a strong signal to Russia, the Kazakhs have been reclaiming their sovereignty and independence in multiple ways. After all, it is what it means to be a Kazakh. The word “Kazakh” is derived from an ancient Turkic word meaning "independent, a free spirit."

Olena Lennon, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor/practitioner in residence of national security at the University of New Haven.