In previous elections, all of the parties other than the Democratic People's Party (Nur-Otan) were unable to pass the 7 percent election threshold. In this election, the party that receives the second highest number of votes will be able to hold seats in the assembly even if it fails to pass the election threshold.
The Kazakh parliament consists of two houses: the assembly and the senate. The assembly has 107 seats while the senate has 47 senators. Fifteen senators are elected by the president while the remaining 32 are elected by constituency deputies. The 107-seat assembly has deputies from eight different nations. There are 82 Kazakhs, including the speaker, 17 Russians, two Germans, one Belarusian, one Bulgarian, one Korean, one Uighur, one Ukrainian and one Uzbek.
Seven political parties participated in the elections, but President Nursultan Nazarbayev's Nur-Otan is expected to score an overwhelming victory. According to the preliminary results, Nur-Otan received 81 percent of the national vote while Kazakhstan Ak-Jol and the Kazakhstan Communist People's Party were able to secure seats in the assembly after receiving 7.3 percent each.
Actually, one does not need to be an oracle to say who will secure representation in the assembly. During last year, Nur-Otan realized that it would no longer be able to maintain its position as the only party represented in parliament, and it is no longer possible to sustain the Soviet-era traditions of having single-party parliaments. There were preparations for a controlled transition to a multiparty democratic parliamentary system. Therefore, everyone knew that Nur-Otan would win elections with an overwhelming majority and that two parties, which would work in harmony with Nur-Otan, would be allowed to enter parliament. In this way, Kazakhstan would take a small and cautious step towards democracy. And it happened as expected. Out of the seven parties that entered elections, only one, the social democrats, is a true opposition party. The remaining parties are just derivatives of Nur-Otan. Moreover, in the cities, particularly Astana and Almaty, turnout in the elections was low as voters believed that nothing would change by casting their votes or not.
Despite the odds, Kazakhstan is taking the right steps. Yet, it should take bigger steps in a way the country deserves. It should stop belittling the importance of democratization with the extreme confidence created by a process of quickly getting rich thanks to oil and natural gas exports, and it should get over the unreasonably high concern created by terrorist attacks in the country. To this end, Kazakhstan should closely study its small southern neighbor Kyrgyzstan, and take it as a model. Indeed, with the presidential elections held on Oct. 30, 2011, Kyrgyzstan managed to leave behind 20 years of turbulence. The Kyrgyz democracy shook the powerful presidential systems inherited from the Soviet Union in Central Asia to the core. Kyrgyzstan proved that a Central Asian country can obtain the world's respect without having natural resources.
During the last 20 years, Kazakhstan managed to uphold the Kazakh model, which protects ethnic and religious identities and makes them part of the whole. It has been able to strike a successful balance between modernization and traditional values. I believe Kazakhstan will also successfully implement a multiparty democracy, but it requires taking some bold steps.
