The President of Kazakhstan has announced January 10, 2021, as the date for the next parliamentary elections in the country. On this day, 107 members of the Lower House (or Majlis) will be elected. Elections for local government bodies, the Maslikhats, will also take place on the same day
Issues to consider for Kazakhstan:
Early Elections: The elections will hold earlier than the stipulated time. This is not unusual as early elections have become the norm in Kazakhstan. The 2016 parliamentary elections were snap elections, called several months early by the parliament itself. Also, since the adoption of the Kazakh Constitution in 1995, not a single election for the Majlis has been held on time.
Political Participation: Earlier in 2020, Kazakhstan adopted amendments to its law on political parties with a review of the number of signatures required to register as a candidate for a party from 40,000 to 20,000 and established quotas for women and youth in party lists. This has been done to enable more opposition parties to participate in the elections as there are only six officially registered parties in Kazakhstan.
Critics, however, insist these amendments are cosmetic as there have been instances where attempts to form a party were clamped down upon. In February 2020 activists en route to Almaty for the planned founding congress of the Democratic Party of Kazakhstan were detained. This has caused a low level of trust in government and its newly instituted amendments.
The Credibility of Elections: No elections that have held in Kazakhstan have been considered to be free or fair as issues like ballot tampering, press censorship and harassment of opposition candidates are common. The current president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who was re-elected into office in April 2019, had 97.7 per cent of the vote in a voter turnout of 95.22 per cent. Till date, these numbers are widely believed to have been exaggerated.
Bottomline
The new members of the Majlisa will be facing the major task of restoring the economy of Kazakhstan as well as restoring trust in government for the landlocked country whose political culture is mostly characterized by conservatism.
