ASTANA, Kazakhstan — The tempests that have whirled through other authoritarian states dissipated well before reaching this Muslim country, where last week citizens effusively thanked their president for his 20 years in power by awarding him five more.
WHILE demonstrators in north Africa and the Middle East are standing up to one-man rule in their countries, great numbers of people in Kazakhstan thronged to the polls on April 3rd to vote for an authoritarian strongman who has been in power since the days of the Soviet Union.
(SRI) - Timur Kulibayev, the billionaire son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, has on Tuesday been named head of the state-owned investment and holding company Samruk-Kazyna.
Nursultan Nazarbayev, the "victor" in Kazakhstan's recent presidential election with 95 percent of the vote, claimed on this page April 1 that his country has a democratic destiny.
Nursultan Nazarbayev is a popular guy. By all accounts, the approval ratings for the president of Kazakhstan would be the envy of most democratically elected leaders. A poll conducted last year indicated that 89 percent of his compatriots had a favorable opinion of him, an incredible figure that was consistent with past surveys. The usual explanation is that he has successfully steered the economy of this energy-rich Central Asian state — and that his regime guarantees that he never faces any serious opposition.
Last Sunday, in another election with no genuine opponents, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan won in a landslide. Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe cited "serious irregularities." Like the deposed Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, Nazarbayev has lifted the economy and public expectations but is vulnerable to resentment over corruption, a toxic brew.
Riot police staged a show of force in the capital of ex-Soviet Azerbaijan on Saturday to stop an unauthorised pro-democracy rally and detained dozens of protesters who defied the ban.
