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

On June 5, Kazakhs will vote on a package deal of reforms meant to transform the nation from a super-presidential system to a “presidential system with a strong parliament.”

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

The vote will take place on June 5, just one month after the proposed reforms have been launched. The reform package addresses 33 separate articles – about one third of the overall constitutional articles – and was developed by a working group that Tokayev established in March. The reforms are said to remodel Kazakhstan from a super-presidential system to a “presidential system with a robust parliament,” per Tokayev’s state of the union deal with on March 16.

A super-presidential system is one the place parliaments and courts are only nominally unbiased, and the president and their administration have almost unlimited management over political decision-making. Kazakhstan’s first step to a super-presidential system was the adoption of a brand new structure in 1995 that was pushed by Nursultan Nazarbayev after dissolving an uncooperative parliament. Nazarbayev additional consolidated his private powers with constitutional amendments in 1998, 2007, and 2011.

Nazarbayev began to loosen the president’s control with constitutional amendments in 2017 that slightly redistributed presidential powers to different branches of government and opened the path for the election of native representatives, at the least at the village degree. Nonetheless, Nazarbayev slyly maintained his personal control over Kazakhstan’s politics by together with provisions that protected him as “elbasy,” or chief of the nation.

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The proposed constitutional reforms strip the structure 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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Along with sidelining Nazarbayev, a number of proposed provisions would barely limit the ability of the president. The president should not be a member of a political party, which member of the working group Sara Idrysheva referred to as “the bravest step of our esteemed president.” In anticipation of this amendment, Tokayev stepped down as chairman of the Amanat occasion – 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 relations of the president cannot hold political posts.

A number of proposed measures give parliament more power vis-a-vis the president. Kazakhstan’s parliament will stay bicameral, however the distribution of energy between the higher and lower houses will shift considerably. The Senate will not have the ability to make new legal guidelines, and instead will simply approve or reject legal guidelines passed by the Mazhilis. Furthermore, the method for selecting deputies to both homes will change. 

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

Second, Mazhilis deputies will likely be elected in keeping with a mixed system. Seventy p.c of Mazhilis deputies shall be chosen by proportional elections, and 30 % will probably be straight elected.

The one proposed modifications to the judicial system relate to the reestablishment of the Constitutional Courtroom. Kazakhstan had a Constitutional Courtroom until the adoption of the 1995 structure, which instituted a weaker constitutional council. The president still maintains a strong affect over the Constitutional Court docket’s makeup, nonetheless, with the ability to pick out the court’s chairman and four of the judges; parliament chooses the other three.

Tokayev has emphasized the significance of local governance, marked by the first-ever direct election of village akims and plans to introduce three new oblasts that may deliver government bodies nearer to the populations they represent. Maybe probably the most disappointing aspect of proposed reforms is the lack of significant movement on local representation for residents of Kazakhstan’s largest cities. If the referendum passes, Kazakhstanis will get to vote for akims of oblasts, main cities, and the capital – however, the candidates could have been selected by the president. The appropriate to elect native leadership has been one of the vital constant calls for from Almaty residents, and this attempt to create alternative is ultimately beauty.

The proposed reforms are necessary steps towards real consultant government in Kazakhstan; nonetheless, they do not necessarily constitute forward movement. Many of the amendments are merely reinstating mechanisms of checks on presidential energy that beforehand existed, fairly than materially changing the relationship between state and society, as Tokayev claims.