According to the preliminary results of the early parliamentary elections in Kazakhstan, three parties of the previous parliamentary composition have maintained their mandates. 82.15 percent of voters voted for Nur Otan; 7.14 percent voted for the Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstan; and 7.28 percent voted for Ak Zhol. Other parties didn’t overcome the seven-percent barrier. The director general of the Information Analytical Center for study of social and political processes in post-Soviet space of Moscow State University, Sergei Rekeda, said that the elections were maximally calm, without any excesses. “This characteristic can be addressed not only to the elections directly, but to the entire election campaign, which took place, in my opinion, maximally calm, predictably, with constructive agendas of the participants in these elections,” the expert believes.
In Rekeda’s opinion, the high turnout demonstrated a high level of maturity of Kazakhstan's society: “It is no secret that with the growth of living standards, income levels, with the development of democracy, basically, attention to the political life, attention to the election usually decreases. And here we see an increase of attention in the election, and increased attention to those issues that were at the center of the entire election campaign. And those are not some kind of populist slogans, but rather serious strategic problems of reforming the political system, and administrative reform, which can be quite difficult to perceive immediately. You need to think about it, you need to thoroughly understand what the strategic conception of all these issues is.”
Another observation that confirms this thesis about the maturity of Kazakhstan's society is the fact that elections were held to the Maslikhats, Rekeda said: “These elections didn't involve a lot of politics, mostly some household things, local, ordinary, which often are interesting to people, to be honest. Nevertheless, these elections showed relatively high competitiveness that, in general, shows that those democratic institutions in Kazakhstan that exist are not some surface phenomenon.”
Regarding the prospects of political life in Kazakhstan, it seems to the expert that “it is no coincidence that on election day the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev noted that the problem of redistribution of power between the branches of power – parliament, president and government – is being discussed. Because apparently this problem will be among the central problems in the near future. Not only at the level of talks, but it also will move into the practical plane. And here, of course, it should be noted that the new parliament will have to work in new conditions. It will have more authority, which is naturally associated with increasing responsibility. Here, we can only wish for the deputies, who were elected yesterday, to live up to the responsibility and hopes placed in them. Such changes also require a fresh look and new people, and a certain upgrade of the elite, but with the preservation of succession.”
