The Sultanate of Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev carried off the latest in a remarkable string of election victories. His party won every single seat up for grabs in yesterday's parliamentary election. Read AP story. The upshot: the Caspian states are not republics, but sultanates.
The question is not how it is possible to lose no local election, nor whether the election was free and fair (the Europeans said progress was made toward that goal; the former Soviet observers deemed it another grand election in the state); obviously Nazarbayev's deputies rigged the outcome.
Instead, one might ask why Nazarbayev no longer feels it necessary while he is rigging his elections to throw a few crumbs to the opposition.
The answer is that Nazarbayev has now fully made the political transition from Communist Party boss. For a long time, Nazarbayev regarded himself as the most statesmanlike and worldly of the region's leaders, and hesitated to assume some of the accouterments of power that his neighbors took on. Nazarbayev's lieutenants routinely defended him by comparison, snickering at the late Turkmen leader, Saparmurat Niyazov, who ran a personality cult, they would say.
Nazarbayev has shed any hesitation. The election shows that.
Some of the smart thinking says that Nazarbayev's most recent actions -- his very public family spat, his pursuit of his former son-in-law around Europe, his ejection at least for now of his eldest daughter from politics -- actually show that he is weak and frightened. That is probably wishful thinking.
The West should stop the farce of dispatching election monitors to Central Asia and the Caucasus. For starters, it's old and failed international politics, a 1990s approach to diplomacy that didn't move the countries toward truly competitive elections and stronger institutions.
The other reason is that none of the 'Stans, nor Azerbaijan, is a truly elected government. Whatever label one chooses -- kingdom, sultanate, sheikhdom -- all of them have chosen to be unapologetically self-appointed, and that is the way it is going to be for some time to come.
The question is not how it is possible to lose no local election, nor whether the election was free and fair (the Europeans said progress was made toward that goal; the former Soviet observers deemed it another grand election in the state); obviously Nazarbayev's deputies rigged the outcome.
Instead, one might ask why Nazarbayev no longer feels it necessary while he is rigging his elections to throw a few crumbs to the opposition.
The answer is that Nazarbayev has now fully made the political transition from Communist Party boss. For a long time, Nazarbayev regarded himself as the most statesmanlike and worldly of the region's leaders, and hesitated to assume some of the accouterments of power that his neighbors took on. Nazarbayev's lieutenants routinely defended him by comparison, snickering at the late Turkmen leader, Saparmurat Niyazov, who ran a personality cult, they would say.
Nazarbayev has shed any hesitation. The election shows that.
Some of the smart thinking says that Nazarbayev's most recent actions -- his very public family spat, his pursuit of his former son-in-law around Europe, his ejection at least for now of his eldest daughter from politics -- actually show that he is weak and frightened. That is probably wishful thinking.
The West should stop the farce of dispatching election monitors to Central Asia and the Caucasus. For starters, it's old and failed international politics, a 1990s approach to diplomacy that didn't move the countries toward truly competitive elections and stronger institutions.
The other reason is that none of the 'Stans, nor Azerbaijan, is a truly elected government. Whatever label one chooses -- kingdom, sultanate, sheikhdom -- all of them have chosen to be unapologetically self-appointed, and that is the way it is going to be for some time to come.
Labels: Caspian, election, Kazakhstan, oil, washington
