On 29 March, the citizens of Uzbekistan will visit polling stations around the country to elect the president of their republic. As per the non-democratic praxis to which Uzbek politics has conformed since the early 1990s, the electoral outcome has already been pre-determined, with incumbent president Islam A. Karimov certain to be returned to office for another term. Neighbouring Kazakhstan is also well on the way to re-electing its leader for another five-year term: the regime is expected to organise a snap election in the autumn of 2015, to re-confirm Nursultan A. Nazarbaev as president of the republic, which he has led since its independence.
Holding elections at semi-regular intervals may well be a nod to those sectors of the ‘international community’, which are willing to believe in Tashkent’s and Astana’s commitment to political liberalisation.The predictable landslide victories of the incumbents, however, ought not to be taken at face value: the presidents’ internal support is not as monolithic as post-election data will inevitably attempt to suggest. In the highly personalised political systems led by Karimov and Nazarbaev, elections have been reduced to a routine chapter in the local authoritarian practice, and, as a consequence, no longer represent the barometer of the leaderships’ internal support. But internal support is not entirely necessary to ensure regime preservation.
Regime backing
The very issue of regime backing, ultimately, is crucial to the crystallisation of authoritarianism in post-Soviet Central Asia, where the support/repression nexus has come to underpin regime relations with two key domestic constituencies. A strategy of systematic oppression – as recently underlined by Human Rights Watch – established (and eventually preserved) regime control over the local populations. And a mix of shrewd deal-making and ruthless retribution has, on the other hand, regulated Central Asia’s intra-elite relations, which have been transformed into a depressing competition for the cadres’ proximity to the leaders.
