been rung up by a line manager and asked to vote.
“Of course I voted for Nazarbayev,” she said. “Who are the other two?”
One of the candidates standing against Nazarbayev, Turgun Syzdykov, is a 68-year-old former official who has campaigned on an anti-globalisation platform, railing against Hollywood, hamburgers and computer games. He represents the Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstan.
The other, Abelgazy Kusainov, 63, has held several important governmental posts and currently heads the national federation of trade unions. He is standing as an independent with a campaign touching on Kazakhstan’s environmental problems. “This is not an election, it is a re-election,” Dosym Saptaev, director of the Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group, a think tank based in the largest city Almaty, told AFP.
“The significance of the event is no more than the fact that it may well be Nazarbayev’s last.”
An Ipsos MORI poll released on Tuesday showed 91 percent of Kazakhstan’s citizens are satisfied with Nazarbayev’s rule.
Economic issues have come to the forefront in recent months in Kazakhstan, the most prosperous of the five ex-Soviet Central Asian states.
Kazakhstan’s domestic producers have been laying off workers as they struggle to compete with Russian imports made cheaper by the dramatic weakening of the sanctions-hit ruble.
Kazakhstan banned a number of Russian foodstuffs in March and April, citing standards violations, and also restricted imports of Russian fuel. Moscow, traditionally viewed as a strong ally of the republic, implemented tit-for-tat measures.
Depressed prices for Kazakhstan’s main export, crude oil, have created a headache for the government, with ratings agency Standard and Poor’s downgrading the country’s sovereign credit rating from BBB+ to BBB — close to junk territory — earlier this year.
The vast, steppe-dominated country bordering both Russia and China has never held an election deemed free and fair by international monitors.
Nazarbayev claimed victory in the last presidential election in 2011, with 95.5 percent of the vote. Sunday’s ballot — called a year ahead of schedule — is the fifth he has contested.
In its interim report on the vote, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) raised concerns about Nazarbayev’s “institutional advantage”.