Kazakhs Vote for New Parliament After Worst Violence in 20 Years
January 15, 2012, 10:23 AM ESTBy Nariman Gizitdinov and Svetlana Antoncheva
Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Kazakhs head to the polls today for early parliamentary elections a month after the central Asian nation endured its worst violence in 20 years.
Voting began at 7 a.m. local time at 9,764 polling stations and will end at 8 p.m., Aigerim Tazhiyeva, a spokeswoman for the Central Electoral Committee in the capital, Astana, said Jan. 13 by phone. Preliminary results may be announced tomorrow, with the official tally to be published within a week, she added.
Riots broke out last month in an oil-rich region in the west of the former Soviet Union’s second-biggest energy producer, killing 16 people after months of strikes by workers at the state-run energy company. The ruling Nur Otan party, which polls suggest will win four fifths of the vote, has pledged to change the political system following the unrest.
“We expect the weekend’s usually uneventful Kazakh parliamentary elections to take place in a more fraught political environment,” Ivan Tchakarov, an economist at Renaissance Capital in Moscow said in Jan. 13 note. “Although we believe the elections will cement the leading role of the presidential Nur Otan Party, the lower house of parliament will now see at least one more party represented.”
Central Asia’s largest economy probably grew 6.5 percent in 2011 and may expand 5.6 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Fitch Ratings upgraded Kazakhstan’s sovereign rating one step to BBB on Nov. 21, level with Russia, as energy exports boosted foreign-currency assets.
‘Stability, Development’
“I’m sure Kazakh citizens will support stability, development and efforts to improve people’s lives,” President Nursultan Nazarbayev said in a Jan. 13 speech published on his website. Other parties’ campaigns featured “empty rhetoric, name calling and absolutely no comprehension of real life.”
Nazarbayev, who has ruled the Central Asian state since 1989 in the Soviet era, won a new five-year term last April with 95.5 percent backing. He was named “leader of the nation” in 2010, giving him power to dictate policy even after he retires.
Support for Nur Otan is 80.1 percent, according to a Jan. 4-6 survey of 1,500 respondents conducted by the Institute of Democracy research association. The Akzhol party is next with 7.3 percent backing, just above the legislature’s 7 percent entry barrier, the poll showed. The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points.
Bulat Abilov, head of the National Social Democratic Party, and Gulzhan Yergaliyeva, another party candidate, were banned from the ballot after filing false reports on their income and property, the electoral commission said Jan. 13 on its website.
‘Serious Political Changes’
“We feel that serious political changes are required” to stave off “large-scale” unrest following the riots, Erlan Karin, Nur Otan’s party secretary, said in a Jan. 9 interview in the capital, Astana. The composition of the government will change after the parliamentary elections and other steps will be taken to modernize the political system, he said, without elaborating.
The discord, instigated by workers of KazMunaiGas Exploration Production in the town of Zhanaozen, was “unprecedented in a country that has enjoyed one of the most stable political environments in the region,” Standard & Poor’s said Dec. 22, leaving its BBB+ credit rating unchanged.
The clashes in Zhanaozen were of a local character and probably won’t spread nationally, according to Andrei Chebotarev, head of Alternative, a research institute in Almaty, the country’s commercial capital.
“The opposition won’t be able to arrange protests on the same scale as those that happened in Russia,” he said, referring to demonstrations in Moscow last month that targeted Prime Minister Vladimir Putin after alleged vote rigging in Russian parliamentary elections.
New Election Rules
Nur Otan won all the seats in Kazakhstan’s legislature in an August 2007 vote. The election law was changed two years later to ensure that if only one party passes the 7 percent threshold, the party with the second-highest number of votes gets no less than two seats, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said last month in a report.
The elections will do little to alter the status quo and don’t address investor concerns over who will rule the former Soviet Union’s second-biggest oil producer after 71-year-old Nazarbayev retires, according to Kate Mallinson, senior analyst at political risk evaluator GPW.
“There will be a two-party parliament but the second party will be loyal to the president,” she said in a Jan. 11 telephone interview from London. “This won’t lead to more democracy in the country.”
--With assistance from Henry Meyer in Moscow. Editors: Andrew Langley, Andrew Atkinson, Balazs Penz
To contact the reporters on this story: Nariman Gizitdinov in Almaty at ngizitdinov@bloomberg.net Svetlana Antoncheva in Astana at santoncheva1@bloomberg.net;
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net;
