What’s in Kazakhstan’s Constitutional Referendum? – The Diplomat

On June 5, Kazakhs will vote on a package deal of reforms intended to rework the country from a super-presidential system to a “presidential system with a powerful parliament.”

Six months after Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called protesters terrorists and requested help from the Russian-backed Collective Safety Treaty Group to quell mass unrest, citizens will participate in a referendum on constitutional reforms. 

The vote will happen on June 5, only one month after the proposed reforms have been launched. The reform bundle addresses 33 separate articles – about one third of the entire constitutional articles – and was developed by a working group that Tokayev established in March. The reforms are stated to transform Kazakhstan from a super-presidential system to a “presidential system with a robust parliament,” per Tokayev’s state of the union tackle on March 16.

An excellent-presidential system is one where parliaments and courts are solely nominally independent, and the president and their administration have almost unlimited control over political decision-making. Kazakhstan’s first step to a super-presidential system was the adoption of a new constitution in 1995 that was pushed by Nursultan Nazarbayev after dissolving an uncooperative parliament. Nazarbayev further consolidated his personal powers with constitutional amendments in 1998, 2007, and 2011.

Nazarbayev began to loosen the president’s management with constitutional amendments in 2017 that slightly redistributed presidential powers to different branches of presidency and opened the trail for the election of local representatives, a minimum of at the village level. Nonetheless, Nazarbayev slyly maintained his private management over Kazakhstan’s politics by together with provisions that protected him as “elbasy,” or leader of the nation.

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The proposed constitutional reforms strip the constitution of mentions of elbasy and the First President of the Republic, which some see as a continued signal of the Nazarbayev household’s fall from grace. 

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In addition to sidelining Nazarbayev, a number of proposed provisions would barely prohibit the facility of the president. The president should not be a member of a political party, which member of the working group Sara Idrysheva called “the bravest step of our esteemed president.” In anticipation of this modification, Tokayev stepped down as chairman of the Amanat social gathering – a rebranded version of Nazarbayev’s ruling Nur Otan celebration – on April 26. Moreover, the president can now not override the acts of akims of oblasts, main cities, or the capital and close family members of the president can not maintain political posts.

Several proposed measures give parliament more power vis-a-vis the president. Kazakhstan’s parliament will remain bicameral, but the distribution of power between the upper and lower houses will shift somewhat. The Senate will not have the facility to make new laws, and instead will just approve or reject laws handed by the Mazhilis. Moreover, the method for selecting deputies to each homes will change. 

First, the Mazhilis will be decreased to 98 deputies, following the abolition of nine seats appointed by the Assembly of the Peoples of Kazakhstan. Those seats can be transferred to the Senate, and the Meeting of the Peoples will now solely get to nominate 5 deputies. The number of deputies appointed by the president will be lowered from 15 to 10.

Second, Mazhilis deputies will likely be elected in accordance with a mixed system. Seventy p.c of Mazhilis deputies can be chosen by proportional elections, and 30 percent shall be instantly elected.

The one proposed changes to the judicial system relate to the reestablishment of the Constitutional Court. Kazakhstan had a Constitutional Court docket until the adoption of the 1995 constitution, which instituted a weaker constitutional council. The president still maintains a strong affect over the Constitutional Court’s make-up, nevertheless, with the flexibility to pick the courtroom’s chairman and four of the judges; parliament chooses the opposite three.

Tokayev has emphasised the importance of local governance, marked by the first-ever direct election of village akims and plans to introduce three new oblasts that may convey government bodies closer to the populations they symbolize. Maybe essentially the most disappointing side of proposed reforms is the shortage of serious movement on local representation for residents of Kazakhstan’s largest cities. If the referendum passes, Kazakhstanis will get to vote for akims of oblasts, major cities, and the capital – nonetheless, the candidates will have been selected by the president. The right to elect local leadership has been one of the vital consistent demands from Almaty residents, and this try to create alternative is in the end beauty.

The proposed reforms are necessary steps toward actual representative authorities in Kazakhstan; nonetheless, they do not necessarily represent forward movement. Most of the amendments are merely reinstating mechanisms of checks on presidential energy that beforehand existed, relatively than materially altering the connection between state and society, as Tokayev claims.