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Ringing Out the Old and Bringing in The New?
Neweurasia Cross-Blog Survey: 2007 in Retrospect
The most striking thing about this year is that Central Asia’s leaders have shown their skills in successfully merging old with new.
One party rule has returned to the region; Kazakhstan’s Nur Otan party was the only one to make it “past the post” with the required seven percent minimum in the August 2007 Majlis elections. Kazakhstan, though, has been accepted as a proto-European country as the Kazakhs got the OSCE chairmanship that they so strongly lobbied for, and only a year later — 2010 — than they sought; they also promised to not change the basic institutions of the organization, including ODIHR.
Old leaders have gotten new leases on political life, while a “new generation” leader has developed what appear to be sturdy political roots. The Kazakh constitution has been modified to allow Nursultan Nazarbayev to continue to run for office should he choose to when his current term expires in 2012, while Islam Karimov has offered his own unstated interpretation of the Uzbek constitution. He simply declared his candidacy and faces certain victory on December 23.
Turkmenistan’s president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is proving much more of a political master than many anticipated. Not only has he held onto power, but he traveled to New York and Brussels basically to announce that Turkmenistan was reopened for international business. But just when U.S. and EU energy experts were getting their hopes up that Turkmen gas might be shipped more directly to market under the Caspian, he signed a new gas deal with Russia, albeit a much better one than the Turkmen have ever been offered before, so the threat of competition was of clear benefit to Ashgabat.
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