Bad year for elites?
So far been a bad year for Prince Andrew, and it just got worse with his buddy Nazarbaev looking like his 30 year stint running Kazakhstan is coming to a close.
Extraordinary and unexpected scenes across cities in Kazakhstan. The Presidential residency in Almaty getting sacked, along with government buildings. The actual Presidential palace is in Astana the new capital.
This all started from fuel price protests, but we have seen similar scenes across EM and more are surely to follow.
But think in Kazakhstan there is long standing unease over illiberal rule by Nazarbaev - he stood down as President in favour of Tokayev to become “father of the nation” but the Nazarbaev family still runs the show. The daughter, Dariga, was known for being active around Halyk bank - the “peoples’ bank” but guess all people are not equal. The population might just have had enough.
It feels like the regime is on the edge. The initial response was concessions - they pulled fuel price hikes and sacked the govt. But demonstrations continued and worsened today. This looks like regime change unless troops are willing to crack down. So far they are not.
Key here is Russia and Putin. He is willing to brutally suppress opposition and there is no way he would be fine with his loyal ally, Nazarbaev getting booted out. Remember he hates coloured revolutions. He would worry that Russia would be next. True he kind of went with the flow recently in Armenia albeit he made sure that the new leader, Pashinyan, knew he ultimately had to be loyal to Moscow. But Nazarbaev is a different cookie - former Soviet leader, good friend of Putin.
I think ultimately Russia will deploy its OMON security forces to help the Kazakhs. And the opposition will be put down.
There is another angle here - that it might all be part of Putin’s Greater Russia scenario. Kazakhstan has a large ethnic Russian population located in northern Kazakhstan adjacent to the Russian border. There has been talk of Russia annexing it in a worst case scenario. This might be it, but I doubt that Putin would have fermented political unrest in Kazakhstan to engineer that.
Could it stall Putin’s plans for a Ukraine? Doubt it - he cares more about Ukraine than Kazakhstan ultimately. Likely he will see the CIA active in all this.
But interesting start to 22’ - autocrats beware, Nazarbaev, Bolsonaro, Orban, Erdogan, Putin.