The rapid programme of political reform launched by Kazakhstan’s president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has continued with his announcement that the promised referendum on constitutional changes will be held in weeks, not months, writes political editor Nick Powell.
A major overhaul of Kazakhstan’s political system, requiring changes to more than a third of the constitution, will be put to the people in a referendum on 5th June. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed the decree naming the date just days after stating that it was time to start respecting once the requirement that constitutional changes are put to a popular vote.
His proposal involves 56 constitutional amendments, which transfer important powers from himself to the Kazakh parliament and are also aimed at decentralising the government of this vast nation. The Constitutional Court, which was abolished in 1995, will be reinstated and the President will be banned from being a member of a political party.
President Tokayev has already resigned from the ruling party, which he had previously led. It will no longer be possible for a president’s relatives to hold public office, a move seen as part of a decisive break with the previous president, Nursultan Nazarbaev.
The President and his ministers have spoken of creating a ‘new Kazakhstan’ and a ‘second republic’, steps which have been welcomed by the country’s leading think tank, the Institute for Strategic
Studies, where the talk is of ‘a full relaunch of the political system’ and ‘becoming a country with political institutions that approximate the western model’.
But all countries have their own issues and in Kazakhstan there’s always acute awareness of ensuring that the nation’s ethic minorities don’t feel alienated by political changes. President Tokayev announced the referendum in a speech to the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan, a consultative body created to ensure that all Kazakhs feel that they are part of the nation, regardless of their family backgrounds.
The largest ethnic minority are two million Russians, out of a population of 19 million, but as the director of the Institute of Strategic Studies, Yerkin Tukumov, put it, “our Russians are different to Russians in the Russian Federation, we are mentally close”. One of his colleagues, Taigat Kaliyev, observed that while measures would continue to strengthen the status of Kazakh as the national language, Russian would remain the language for inter-ethnic communication.
Meanwhile, in the lower house of parliament, the Mazhilis, members are looking forward to increased powers as Kazakhstan moves away from a ‘super-presidential’ system of government. They face a shake-up of the electoral system and greater competition as it’s made easier to form a political party. But Aidos Sarym, from the ruling Amanat party, told journalists that the party needed to “grow its own experience and not rely on the President, as we become a country where all positions are elected”.
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