Astana: Campaign for the parliamentary election in full swing

Vote set for 19 March, along with local government elections. Independent candidates denounce harassment by the authorities. To register as a candidate, 2,500 euros are needed: the average salary in the country is around 700. A broad victory for President Tokaev's party is expected.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - The electoral campaign in Kazakhstan, ahead of the parliamentary and local elections on 19 March, is increasingly coming to a head, after the first public confrontations between the candidates on the various lists, revealing a social reality that is still in motion, despite attempts to control it from above.

After last year's dramatic and bloody political tensions, the various groups are cautiously trying to propose real political reforms. The independent and opposition candidates who have managed to run for office, however, complain that they have little chance of getting into the various Maskhilat, central and local parliaments.

Journalist and independent candidate Lukpan Akhmedjarov, in his election videos, describes in detail his journey through the thirty years of Kazakhstan's independence, in which he became aware of corruption even in the world of information. He took to the streets in anti-government demonstrations, even suffering an assassination attempt in which he was hit with nine stab wounds and two bullets from an air gun.

Akhmedjarov criticises his opponents in the ruling 'Amanat' party, stating that 'previously this formation was a collection of corrupt officials; today it supports a person who hid his son for over a month from the public security organs, after he accidentally killed a woman who was rowing in a boat... and this person promises us to ensure the superiority of the law!'

The reporter is very popular in the north-western Uralsk region, and will fight for the uninominal seat along with 700 other candidates. Uninominal seats have been contested again since 2004, but out of hundreds of pretenders, only 29 seats will be available.

This is one of the effects of the constitutional reform promoted by President Kasym-Žomart Tokaev, after the dramatic events that led to the deaths of 238 people in January 2022.

Despite appearances, according to Akhmedjarov, 'we independent and out-of-system candidates are constantly looking at each other, and wondering when we will be taken out and how'. Checks on candidates' tax returns have already led to the exclusion of several of them, especially at the municipal level.

In Uralsk, as the candidate recounts, 'already a few hours after the official start of the campaign, several expensive billboards appeared, and various advertisements on television, as if some people could freely use administrative resources'.

The candidate for the Almaty regional parliament, Žibek Amenova, witnessed how the police arrested another candidate, Aygerim Tleužanova, directly at the election committee. She is now under investigation for the riots at the local airport a year ago, and was excluded from the lists for 'falsifying bank documentation'.

For Amenova, 'it was an absolutely illegitimate arrest, the law cannot block her status as a candidate, even according to the rulings of the Supreme Court'. Both are candidates of the alliance of independents.

Akhmedjarov also complains that he had to pay to register his candidacy a sum of more than one million tenge (around 2,500 euro) 'in a country where the average salary is around 700 euro', a figure that is already exorbitant outside Almaty and Astana.

He has tried to organise a fund-raising campaign to support candidates, but this is only possible at a single bank, Halyk, which only collects contributions paid physically at its branches, upon presentation of a proxy signed by the candidate, and confirmed by a notarial deed.

At every public meeting of Akhmedjarov and the other independents, people turn up and loudly ask "which foreign agency is financing you?", and accuse them of not being patriotic enough, because they send their children to study abroad. Akhmedjarov's 17-year-old daughter is just finishing high school, but has already submitted an official application for an institution outside Kazakhstan. He replied 'I hope you will make the same objections about Tokaev and Nazarbaev's children and their property abroad'.

The new parliament will in any case be dominated by Tokaev's 'Amanat' party, heir to Nazarbaev's 'Nur Otan', and the only question of the 'democratic revolution' will be about the few seats that will be allocated to the other admitted parties, and the few courageous truly independent candidates.