Executive Summary:
- More than 70 percent of Kazakhstan’s voters reportedly took part in a March 15 referendum on a new constitution and voted to approve it. The new basic law will enter into force on June 1, with a new parliament to be elected later this year and a new president in 2029.
- Kazakhstan has frequently amended its constitution in the past, but this is a complete rewrite. The new constitution would limit the president to a single term, allow the president to appoint important government officials, and replace Kazakhstan’s bicameral legislature with a unicameral body.
- Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev says these changes will allow for the regular change of power, ending the risk that any one person could remain in power for a lengthy period. Some in the opposition, however, argue that the changes make Astana’s system even more “presidential” and consolidate Tokayev’s power.
More than 85 percent of those exit-polled in Kazakhstan’s March 15 referendum voted to replace the country’s much-amended 1995 constitution (Central Election Commission of Kazakhstan, March 15; Orda.kz, March 16). Astana will release finalized results on March 20. Preliminary figures indicate that more than 72 percent of Kazakhstan’s voters took part. The new basic law will enter into force on June 1, with a new parliament to be elected later this year and a new president in 2029. The new constitution is a sweeping rewrite of the 1995 version—only four of the original’s 99 paragraphs remain unchanged (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, March 15). Under the new constitution, Kazakhstan’s president would be restricted to a single term, reaffirming a 2022 law that some observers say paves the way for Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to “reset” his term after it expires. The new document would also replace Kazakhstan’s bicameral legislature with a unicameral legislature and boost the power of the Council of Ministers and political parties (Spik.kz, February 20, March 3, 16). The prospective constitution makes symbolic changes, including referencing the country as Kazakh Eli, “the land of the Kazakhs,” and changing the status of the Russian language from a position of equality with Kazakh to one “alongside” the titular language (see EDM, March 12).
Tokayev, the driving force behind these changes, argues that they will allow for a more regular rotation of power (Vostochniy Ekspress, March 14[1], [2]; Orda.kz, March 16). Some in the Kazakh opposition, however, say that the system will become more “presidential” under the new constitution, given the president’s ability to control the dominant parties and the weakness of opposition groups (BBC Russkaya Sluzhba, February 11; RFI, March 13; Nezavisimaya Gazeta, March 15). Even if this is the case, the newly approved constitution represents a major change that distances Kazakhstan from its Soviet predecessor (The Times of Central Asia, February 5, March 13[1],[2]).
Since the government released a draft of the new constitution after several months of work by a presidentially-approved group of officials and legal experts, public attention has focused on the future status of the Russian language and the radical changes in Kazakhstan’s political institutions (Tengri News, January 31; seeEDM, March 12; Meduza, March 14). In the days leading up to the vote, Kazakh writers focused on changes to Kazakhstan’s political institutions. This concentration is not surprising given the radical nature of some of these changes and uncertainty about whether the reforms will be undermined by the country’s political culture and the actions of those in power.
The most striking changes introduced by the new constitution concern the presidency. Under the new rules, no one will be allowed to serve more than a single seven-year term in the country’s highest office. This single-term limit will also apply to the head of the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the procurator general. No one related to the president will be allowed to fill any of those positions or other prominent roles (Spik.kz, March 3). Moreover, the president will no longer be allowed to appoint a certain number of members of the parliament under the “presidential quota.” These are welcome reforms in a country where the first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, served for decades and routinely installed his relatives in the legislature and in other senior positions.
Some commentators suspect that these changes will not guarantee democracy’s flourishing in Kazakhstan because of the country’s political culture and the president’s outsized authority, and argue that many of the changes are designed to consolidate the president’s power. The new constitution reinstates the vice presidency, which was abolished in 1996. The president has the right to appoint the vice president and other top officials with majority congressional approval (Spik.kz, March 3). Under these new rules, the president may still be able to exploit parties in parliament or use other provisions of the new constitution to subvert them. There have already been suggestions that Tokayev will use the constitution the way Russian President Vladimir Putin distorted the Russian one to ignore his earlier term in office and begin again. The new constitution retains a very powerful presidential role, and may be less changed than Tokayev suggests (BBC Russkaya Sluzhba, February 11; Nezavisimaya Gazeta, March 15).
One major reason for these concerns involves changes in the country’s legislature. Up to now, Kazakhstan has had a bicameral legislature. Now, it will have a unicameral body with more members, filled by party lists rather than by independent single-member district representatives. Astana says this change is intended to make the parliament more professional by ensuring that members pass a party test as well as an electoral one, but it could make it easier for the president to dominate the entire government by controlling majority parties. It would be more difficult for the president to dominate parliament if a large share of the deputies were elected as independents—parties can facilitate centralized authority. The parliament is also gaining the right to pass a vote of no confidence on ministers or the government as a whole and to seek their removal, thus making the government dependent on the parliament, over which the president has a large degree of influence. The new constitution also creates the “People’s Council,” a new body fully appointed by the president that has the right to initiate legislation alongside parliament. Moreover, the new constitution requires that all measures be passed three times rather than just once. The Russian State Duma has a similar rule, initially intended to ensure “professionalism,” but which can be used to freeze out dissidents (Vostochniy Ekspress, March 14[1], [2]; Nezavisimaya Gazeta, March 15).
Kazakhstan’s new constitution is not a panacea. Rather, it is a pragmatic effort to move beyond a system largely inherited from the Soviet past and Nazarbayev’s exploitation of those institutions. Nazarbayev served as first secretary of the republic’s communist party from 1989 to 1991, was president from 1991 to 2019, and retained significant powers as chairman of Kazakhstan’s National Security Council until 2022 (see EDM, February 3, 2020). Tokayev has proposed, and the people of Kazakhstan have now approved, a document that represents another step away from Moscow while likely expanding the president’s power. Kazakhstan’s new constitution should serve as a reminder to everyone concerned about future transitions to keep in mind that transitions from the past remain incomplete across the former Soviet space.
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