The devil, as we know, is in the details. And it is the details of the unscheduled 21st congress of the Nur Otan party held in the videoconference format and out of the public view that have caught our attention.
You will recall that the participants of the congress have unanimously elected President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as their new leader. Thus, the process of the power transfer from Nursultan Nazarbayev to his successor has officially ended. Moreover, it has happened much faster and in a much more radical fashion than we imagined it would a month ago.
We have no doubt that the speeches given by Tokayev and Nazarbayev in the course of this political show which the Nur Otan congress clearly was are going to be meticulously analysed by different experts both inside and outside the country. Therefore, we are not going to comment on them and will focus our attention on the details that, in this particular case, may turn out to be much more significant and indicative that the official press-releases and the speeches of the Presidents.
Let us start by saying that the list of the delegates of the unscheduled Nur Otan party congress consisted of 399 persons. Note that the election process was conducted not only in the accelerated but the exceptional manner – by the regional party councils.
Unfortunately, on Nur Otan’s website, we have not been able to find the data on how many people constitute the party membership now. However, judging by the press announcements, we could be talking about 800-850 thousands. And most of them were excluded from electing the delegates of such an important political event.
In other words, no more than a thousand members of the regional political councils were involved in electing the 399 participants of the national party congress (one delegate per every two thousand “nur-otanees”).
According to the official press-release, 389 people have participated in the event, in other words, 10 persons were either not able or not allowed to participate. And these “three hundred Spartans” selected by Baybek and his team have performed a feat by replacing Nursultan Nazarbayev with Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as the head of the party, by making changes to the party charter and by renewing its Political Council in a cardinal way.
We believe that the reasons why the number of the Nur Otan congress participants was so small, although the format of the event (a videoconference) allowed to increase the number of the delegates up to several thousand people, are not hard to plumb.
It seems very likely that the producers of this political show were afraid that some of the delegates would say something unauthorised. For this reason, they tried to, first, reduce the number of the participants to a minimum and, second, select the most reliable people who would never ask Nursultan Nazarbayev any tough questions let alone request Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to investigate how the Elbasy and his relatives became dollar billionaires.
On to the next. The 389 delegates involved in the 21st Nur Otan party congress have elected the Political Council consisting of 92 persons. In other words, they gave credence to every fourth person from among their own community. Note that the party’s supreme body has now few high-rank statesmen and none of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s relatives.
It looks like Akorda and the Library are trying to demonstrate to the Kazakhs that, under the leadership of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the party has moulded or is moulding into something different than it used to be under the Elbasy’s leadership.
We at KZ.expert believe that this political subterfuge involving the change of the Nur Otan image may very well be compared to a plastic surgery. Yes, on one hand, it is a rather serious procedure since it demands a “surgical” intervention but, on the other hand, all it does is change the image making it a little more attractive.
Be as it may, but the fact that now, out of the 92 members of the Political Council, only Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the heads of the Senate and the Mazhilis of the Kazakh Parliament Maulen Ashimbayev and Nurlan Nigmatulin as well as the head of the Presidential Administration Erlan Koshanov can be regarded as “heaven-dwellers” is deeply impressive.
The third detail that, in our opinion, is much more informative than the speeches of Nursultan Nazarbayev and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as well as the official press-releases lies in the fact that the ex-President of the Republic of Kazakhstan and his successor at the presidential post have participated in the event independently.
We suspect that, had the Nur Otan congress been held in the regular format and not in the aftermath of the January tragedy, Nazarbayev and Tokayev would have communicated with their fellow party members from the same room and showed to the country and the world that Tokayev was Nazarbayev’s loyal pupil whom Nazarbayev had entrusted with the country’s governance and the continuation of his political course.
As for the abnormal brevity of the speech of the Nur Otan former leader (not much longer than four minutes), it probably had nothing to do with Nazarbayev’s health issues. He simply had nothing to say to his fellow party members.
Having said that, we would like to underscore that, even though Nazarbayev looked quite decent for his age on screen, his eyes were not blinking and he could not take his eyes off the camera at all. So, it looks his time is really getting close to an end.
We regret that he did have the courage to apologise to the Kazakhs as Russian President Boris Yeltsin once did. Even though the occasion was perfect – handing over the chair of the ruling party’s leader to his successor at the presidential post.
