After landslide election, Kazakhstan faces historical decisions

    President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s crushing poll victory had made clear to the West that Kazakhstan risks no Arab-style uprising, but the Central Asian state still faces historic choices over the next decade.
    Analysts said Kazakhstan must now decide whether to step back from the regime presided over by Nazarbayev to encourage reforms essential for the continued delivery of economic growth.
    Even Kazakh officials admitted that the country’s political system could look very different in the eventual post-Nazarbayev era. The violence now tearing apart other Muslim nations echoed throughout the speeches of the Central Asian state’s veteran president and his confidants as they sailed toward another landslide re-election on Sunday.
    Nazarbayev referred to the tide of uprisings upon being awarded 95.55 percent of the vote on 90 percent turnout by telling a swarm of supporters that while “the world sees bloodshed and ethnic discord, we are unified.”
    According to Presidential adviser Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, the Kazakh leader saw this level of support because he is fundamentally different from other leaders who have ruled their countries for extended periods.
    “President Nazarbayev is a modernizer. He sees future in innovation,” Yertysbayev told AFP. “He is completely different from leaders who spend a long time in power and end their days in sorry circumstances.”
    The vision of the 70-year-old Kazakh chief as a reformer may be hard to accept to those listening to Western criticism of some aspects of the election. Yet there is little doubt that genuine support for the man fondly referred to as “Papa” is massive in a republic in which he holds the dual role of both founding father and elder statesman. And even the West acknowledges Nazarbayev’s role in molding a struggling steppe nation into an island of stability in a massively unstable region.
    Analysts said his replacement - who may not emerge until the end of the decade - will necessarily have to have fewer powers and see political reforms propelled by Nazarbayev’s desire to place limits over the next president.
    “Nazarbayev has spent two decades building a regime which has delivered political stability and by extension economic prosperity to Kazakhstan,” IHS Global Insight analyst Lilit Gevorgyan wrote in a research note, Agence France Presse reports.