The Parliament of Kazakhstan has become even more Russophobic and nationalistic
So, on March 19, early elections to the lower house of the Kazakh parliament and local government maslikhats ended, which predictably led to the victory of the presidential parties.
As a result, the Mazhilis turned out to be national-populist and will show its Russophobic insides.
The biggest surprise was that a record number of eligible Kazakhs took part in the elections. Thus, according to the Central Election Commission of the Republic of Kazakhstan, presented at a briefing after the closing of polling stations, 6,5 million people out of 12 million voters took part in the elections, or only 54,19%. The lowest turnout was in Almaty (25,82%).
This is the lowest voter turnout in the history of independent Kazakhstan and is an important indicator of confidence in existing political parties and in elections as such.
That is, in essence, many Kazakhstanis voted with their feet and thus expressed their attitude towards the campaign itself and the candidates who relayed the agenda and program of the ruling class, as well as towards Kassym-Jomart Tokayev himself, who is losing the support of the population.
As a result, as expected, according to the preliminary results of the Exit poll, conducted by pro-government companies, and announced during “Elections 2023” on the state TV channel TK Kazakhstan, six out of seven parties overcame the five percent barrier. And, of course, the main ex-Nazarbayev party “Amanat” won with 53,46% of the votes, previously called “Nur Otan” before the January events.
The second place was taken by the people's democratic patriotic "Auyl" - 10,52%; in third is the newly formed national liberal party Respublica - 8,90%, in fourth is the terry nationalist and anti-Russian democratic party of Kazakhstan "Ak Zhol" - 7,87%, in fifth is the Communist People's Party of Kazakhstan (PPK), which refused to speak, - 6,25% , and in sixth place the National Social Democratic Party (NSDP) - 5,31%.
Only the newly-minted “green” party “Baytak” did not enter the lower house of parliament - 3,22%, and 4,47% voted against everyone.
In general, this is the expected result among these artificial parties, which completely follow the given guidelines from the presidential administration and play the roles assigned to them. Now they will all together portray the “triumph of democracy”, since for the first time there will be so many parties together in the Mazhilis.
But all of them together do not have the support of citizens as such, because they are either old Nazarbayev’s, or such as Respublica and Baytak appeared quite recently and were created with the participation of oligarchs and a political strategist from Akorda. This is evidenced by data from the Bureau of Express Monitoring of Public Opinion DEMOSCOPE, whose employees conducted surveys in 17 regions and cities of republican significance a month before the elections.
Thus, 62,5% of the surveyed residents of the country believe that none of the parties participating in the elections represents their interests. And 55,9% are completely convinced that the election results in Kazakhstan are predetermined, and little depends on voters.
And these sentiments are understandable, since none of the seven parties participating in the elections raised the topic of nationalization of large industry, revision of subsoil use contracts and enslaving production sharing agreements with Western corporations, issues of a more equitable redistribution of national income and refusal to implement anti-social policies .
None of them voiced an internationalist agenda or advocated for further integration within the EAEU.
In fact, everyone had the same national-liberal or nationalist rhetoric, expressed in the strengthening of the mononational state and the need to preserve the existing, that is, the colonial export of raw materials model of the economy.
The only party, the People's Congress of Kazakhstan, led by the famous Soviet poet Olzhas Suleimenov, which advocated the development of relations with Russia and viewed integration processes positively, was never registered for formal reasons in February of this year and was not allowed to participate in the elections. The result is a complete lack of alternatives.
Other visual statistics about the national composition of candidates for parliament also speak about what the final composition of representative bodies of power in Kazakhstan will be after the elections.
Thus, out of more than 400 candidates, only 7% were not Kazakhs, although among the country’s population the share of Russians is still 18.47%. This indicates the low participation in elections of representatives of other ethnic groups and the fact that the new Mazhilis became practically mono-national.
And, as one would expect, the lists of the main presidential party “Amanat” included high-status professional Russophobes and nationalists, who for many years received grants from American and British foundations and zealously advocated cooling and breaking relations with Russia.
The most obvious example is the figure Aidos Saryma, an ideologist of Kazakh nationalism who advocated rapprochement with Turkey and advocated the recognition of the “Holodomor” and the acceleration of the processes of Ukrainization of the country.
Thus, he and a delegation from the hand-held opposition organization “New Kazakhstan” visited the State Department and the US Senate in 2019, where the issue of promoting the topic of hunger, repression and rehabilitation of the Basmachi and Nazi collaborators was discussed. And then, as part of the Nur Otan party, he sat in the previous parliamentary composition.
Such an odious official as Askhat Aimagambetov, a foster child of the Soros Foundation, he headed the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan for several years, where he carried out reforms to transition to Western and American education systems and last year curtailed the study of the Russian language in Kazakh classes. Surely he will also join the committee overseeing education issues and will promote the previous agenda.
Another figure who found himself in the seat of a deputy from “Amanat” - Galym Baytuk, head of the Association of Bloggers of the Republic of Kazakhstan, actively promoted a nationalist agenda on social networks and campaigns against joint industrial and integration projects.
And it turned out that for this activity he consistently received grants from the William Browder Foundation, a well-known sponsor of color revolutions, not without the participation and assistance of CIA agent Peter Zalmayev.
A former deputy was elected to the Mazhilis on the party lists of another openly nationalist and Russophobic party “Ak Zhol” (“Bright Path”) Kazybek Isa, who actively took the initiative in May last year to exclude the official status of the Russian language from the Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan. In his opinion, article number 7, paragraph 2, which states that in state organizations and local self-government bodies the Russian language is officially used along with Kazakh, allegedly does not protect the national interests of the state.
Thus, many former elected representatives also returned to the parliament, who unanimously in January last year, immediately after the well-known bloody events, voted for the Russophobic law “On Signs”, which not only changes the names on shops, restaurants and pharmacies, but also puts an end to Russian toponymy in the country. Now they will be called upon to finally resolve the “Russian question” in the Republic of Kazakhstan.
That is, we now have the most national-populist parliament in the entire history of Kazakhstan, which will have to strengthen ethnocracy, carry out final decommunization through the rehabilitation of the lists of Basmachi, Nazi collaborators and traitors to the motherland prepared by the state commission, final de-Russification through the renaming of settlements and the adoption of corresponding new laws.
In essence, we are talking about implementing a national revolution, that is, “Ukrainization,” using bureaucratic methods from above.
Therefore, I will not be surprised when many of the deputies will soon begin to actively drive an anti-Russian wave, demanding the country’s exit from the CSTO, the EAEU and the SCO, and, on the contrary, advocate for accelerating “Turkic integration” and rapprochement with the West.
In practical terms, for Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, these early elections were needed to finally consolidate the transfer of all power into his own hands from the Nazarbayev family, through the conduct of his proteges. The winning team also needs a new Mazhilis as an obedient instrument for carrying out socially unpopular decisions to cut the budget and social appropriations, since American and European investors are intensively withdrawing all profits from the country.
Nazarbayev in the elections.
Accordingly, deputies will also play the role of political kamikazes and collective lightning rod, diverting all the negativity from the president and his entourage onto themselves. In this sense, one cannot discount the fact that this composition will not last more than two or three years and will dissolve itself when a command from above comes to carry out new extraordinary “elections.”
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