The social media accounts of politicians in the former Soviet Union have provided journalists with rich material to work with in recent times.
Among the most notable are Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's wildly unpredictable Instagram page and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev's Armenia-baiting Twitter handle.
But over in the oil-rich Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, Prime Minister Karim Massimov's recently re-invigorated Twitter deserves an honourable mention for the sheer brain-wrenching boredom of his tweets.
Below are four Massimov missives capturing events that presumably took place some time between him brushing his teeth in the morning and bedding down to sleep at night:
Karim Massimov ✔ @KarimMassimov_E
Parliament has approved our budget performance report for 2015.
We answered all questions & compared our notes.
3:56 PM - 17 Jun 2016
Karim Massimov ✔ @KarimMassimov_E
Chaired budget commission meeting. Starting to prepare budget plan for 2017.
8:47 PM - 20 Jun 2016
Karim Massimov ✔ @KarimMassimov_E
I held a meeting on the new Budget Code.
3:31 PM - 20 Jun 2016
Karim Massimov ✔ @KarimMassimov_E
Took part in the meeting of the Bureau of the Nur Otan Party.
1:19 PM - 21 Jun 2016
Fighting for survival
None of these largely ignored tweets evoke a man fighting for his political life, and Massimov is well known as one of 75-year-old President Nursultan Nazarbayev's most trusted allies.
But if one of Kazakhstan's top political analysts is to be believed, Massimov's return to social media is a direct reflection of power struggles at the very apex of politics in the Central Asian state.
In a recent Forbes.kz column, Dosym Satpayev wrote:
It is no secret that the struggle for the prime minister's spot is a serious business. The long stay of Massimov in this post can be explained by the fact that [the administration of President Nursultan Nazarbayev] considered him an effective manager during a period of crisis that has come to define Kazakhstan [...] In this respect, however, the premier's image is already under assault. A massive information attack has begun against the prime minister launched by forever fickle MPs and those affiliated with different oligarchic groups and media structures.
Satpayev continued:
There was a time when Massimov vacated the information space, so as not to give his opponents a reason to depict him as a “second sun in the sky”. Now the premier feels it is more dangerous to stay silent. The time to demonstrate activity has come, including in the eyes of the president, who is clearly displeased with the current political and economic situation. Especially because at the beginning of May, the head of state said: “A politician has to talk to people to explain his position, to win the trust of society.”
This view of political pressures forcing Massimov's re-entry into the social media fray was also shared by Asemgul Kassenova, a journalist for one of the country's few relatively independent news websites, Tengri News, which at one time was rumoured to be owned by Massimov himself:
Асемгуль Касенова @AsemgulKasenova
Масимов вернулся в Твиттер, и снова шутит на заседаниях, и снова заседания открыты. Ага, ага . Заколебали эта возня и игры престолов :/
2:45 PM - 21 Jun 2016
So, Massimov has returned to Twitter and has begun to joke at government meetings again. Ahem, ahem. How fed up we are with all this nonsense and Game of Thrones :-/
To be certain, Massimov's Twitter handle is a far cry from the never-ceasing drama of HBO's cult series watched by millions around the world, but perhaps Kazakh politics as a whole isn't.
Clan-based and corrupt, Kazakhstan's national political elite seems suddenly gripped by the uncertainty rooted in long-term ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev's age, plus an economic crisis stoked by recession in Russia and the collapse of global oil prices.
That has manifested itself recently in a number of high profile arrests and court cases against top-ranking officials and power-brokers that some have associated with Nazarbayeva's daughter Dariga taking up the post of deputy prime minister last year.
This could mean trouble for the long-serving Massimov, an urbane and intelligent administrator by all accounts, but one who as an ethnic minority* may lack the deep-rooted support networks required to fend off a sustained attack on his position.
If Kazakhstan's head of government is destined to go, he will hope that this tweet from when he first created his Twitter account back in 2012 does not come back to haunt him.
* Massimov is commonly referred to by Kazakhstanis as an ethnic Uighur, although he has never self-identified as such. Ethnic Uighurs make up less than 2% of the country's population.
Globalvoices.org, 21.06.2016
