Kazakhstan’s veteran leader Nursultan Nazarbayev celebrates his 75th birthday tomorrow, in good shape and vastly popular, but the expected fireworks and fanfare mask uncomfortable questions about the future of the second-largest post-Soviet economy.
Nicknamed ‘Papa’ and officially titled ‘Leader of the Nation’, he extended his 26-year reign in April by another five years, “apologising” to his critics for cornering 97.7 per cent of the vote in an early election which Western observers said offered no real alternative.
With sweeping powers that enable him to keep a tight lid on dissent, the former steelworker prides himself on maintaining discipline and stability in his mainly Muslim country of 17.5 million while overseeing market reforms.
He justifies his iron grip on power by saying it safeguards his Central Asian nation, with a population including Kazakhs, Russians, Ukrainians, ethnic Germans and Tatars, from the shocks that have led to turmoil in other ex-Soviet nations.
Does anyone here want a repeat of what happened in Ukraine?
“Tell me, does anyone here in Kazakhstan want a repeat of what happened in Ukraine, or in Georgia, or in Moldova? Does anyone want to see this here?” he said to a question about ceding some of his presidential powers to Parliament. “These countries all have parliamentary republics,” Nazarbayev said in a documentary made specially for his birthday and aired on July 1.
Most of his opponents have been jailed or have fled abroad but Nazarbayev pays little heed to human rights groups which criticise him for crackdowns on freedom of speech and assembly.
In 2011, he showed his readiness to adopt openly tough measures to curb dissent when a strike over pay and conditions in the oil town of Zhanaozen and a nearby village, escalated to riots.
Police shot dead at least 15 people and a critic of the President was later jailed for more than seven years on charges of rallying oil workers to try to topple the government.
Allowed by the law to run for President as many times as he wants, he has said that he will groom a successor for himself.