Abstract
In 2019, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the oldest post-Soviet authoritarian leader, stepped down from his position as the first and the only president of Kazakhstan, the largest and most richly resource-endowed state in Central Asia. This unexpected move prompts a closer look at Kazakhstan’s political transformations, from the fall of the Soviet Union to Nazarbayev’s resignation and the early post-Nazarbayev transition under new President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. The social contract theory allows for analyzing interactions between the Kazakh elites and the people as part of a long-lasting informal agreement that started when the public had yielded their political freedoms in exchange for the state’s generous redistributive policies. The paper argues that in the late 2010s, the volatility of the global oil price and economic underperformance had significantly undermined the Kazakh social contract, weakening Nazarbayev’s legitimacy, one of the key motivations behind his “benevolent” resignation.
Highlights
On March 22, 2019, during the festive mood of celebration of the national spring holiday of Nowruz, among the citizens of Kazakhstan, a sense of disorientation and confusion arose
The 2001 events revealed that the young post-Soviet Kazakh elite was not entirely satisfied with a system where only Nazarbayev’s inner circle had access to real political influence and resources, which prompted some of newly emerged businessmen and politicians to attempt a “revision” of the existing social contract by raising demands for reforms and democratization, which soundly failed
A series of socioeconomic downfalls—rapid currency devaluation during 2014–2015 with the tenge losing more than 100% of its value and performing worse than the Ukrainian hryvna or the Russian rouble, and mass land reform protests in 2016—revealed decreasing levels of trust in Kazakhstan’s government and an emerging realization that the old social contract was no longer perceived as legitimate
Summary
On March 22, 2019, during the festive mood of celebration of the national spring holiday of Nowruz, among the citizens of Kazakhstan, a sense of disorientation and confusion arose. The 2001 events revealed that the young post-Soviet Kazakh elite was not entirely satisfied with a system where only Nazarbayev’s inner circle had access to real political influence and resources, which prompted some of newly emerged businessmen and politicians to attempt a “revision” of the existing social contract by raising demands for reforms and democratization, which soundly failed. The president’s extremely harsh response to the young reformers showed he viewed the revolt as a violation of the personal loyalty expected of the businessmen and government officials who made their fortune during his rule It signaled there would be no liberalization of the political system or any revisions of the social contract. In terms of economic performance, the global fall of oil prices revealed the weakness of Kazakhstan’s non-oil economic sectors
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