May Day in Kazakhstan

While next week’s UK election looks to be a close call, the Kazakhstan presidential election last week was something of a non-event, with the incumbent polling 97.5% of the vote. Nursultan Nazarbayev has uniquely been in power since before the country existed, as he was previously president of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, and is now viewed as the father of the nation whom it would be unpatriotic not to vote for.

 In fairness he does seem to be an extraordinarily capable man with sound common sense and, most importantly for a nation builder, policies that seek to encourage peaceful co-existence, co-operation and inclusion. A fine example of this was the Mayday holiday; in a delightful contrast to the machismo of Soviet era tanks and rocket launchers rolling through Moscow’s Red Square, Kazakhstan now calls this Unity Day and celebrates the diversity of ethnicity in the country.

The Kazakh people love singing and dancing and without a cloud in the sky in Pavlodar, a stage was built in front of the main civic building and the road closed to traffic. But what we found most interesting were the couple of dozen stage sets that had been erected opposite and decorated by different groups to display their culture. I read that there are 120 nationalities (a looser term than countries) represented in Kazakhstan and we had fun deciphering Cyrillic writing and trying to guess what region each display represented. We had our picture taken with an Armenian girl from Liz’s school, were given fizzy drinks from Ingushetia and practised our Chinese with some men from Xinjiang Province. Many of the groups belonged to the old USSR or present day Russia, and probably had their roots in Stalin’s practice of sending people or populations he didn’t like the look of to Siberia.

While the mean spirited rise of UKIP shames Britain, I like to think that President Nazarbayev’s drive for a country that sees difference as a positive attribute, and strives to respect all its peoples, stems from a natural desire for equality and fairness. But it is also a pragmatic response to uniting a vast country whose borders are lines on a map more than showing any cultural cohesion. A quarter of the population (half in Pavlodar) are ethnic Russians and the president will be acutely aware of recent events in the Ukraine.

The variety of nationalities did not extend to the food, and we sat at one of the temporary outside cafes to eat plov, a ubiquitous Central Asian dish of rice, vegetables and horse meat cooked together in a giant pan over an open fire. While the first president, as he styles himself, is undoubtedly extremely popular, it is against a background of there being no effective opposition, which really makes the electoral process a charade. Evangelical democracy, touted as a new religion and used as an excuse for carrying out all manner of evils, may be overrated but the overwhelming support that Nazarbayev has garnered gives him the power of a benign dictator. The question then arises of who will follow him and will they be as benign.

Some measures have been taken to limit the power of future presidents (the first president is exempt), such as restricting their tenure to two terms, as is the case in the USA and China, but there does not seem to be a clear mechanism for a successor to rise up. Maybe Nazarbayev has learnt a trick from Elizabeth 1^st  and is not keen to have a potential rival, but he cannot last forever. Or maybe he can. He is revered in the country more than is generally attributed to mere mortals and from his election posters he is clearly getting younger.