At its congress in Astana on 12 June, Kazakhstan’s ruling Amanat party announced that it will become part of Adilet, or ‘Justice’, the party registered on 1 June and led by figures close to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, including former senior aides. The decision comes ahead of parliamentary elections expected in August, the first to be held under the country’s new single-chamber parliament.
Amanat is the institutional core of the old order. It was created in 1999 under Nazarbayev, ran for years as Nur Otan, and was rebranded Amanat in 2022 after Tokayev took the chairmanship and then stepped away from it. It has won large majorities in every election it has contested. Adilet, by contrast, held its founding congress on 7 May and is read across Kazakhstan as a vehicle built directly around Tokayev’s agenda.
The timing is set by the new constitution, approved in the March referendum and taking effect on 1 July. It replaces the two-chamber parliament with a single Kurultai of 145 deputies elected by party list, with the vote expected in the second half of August. Tokayev is due to leave office when his term ends in 2029.
Folding Amanat into a party led by his own aides closes the Nazarbayev chapter.
The move also closes a long arc. Tokayev sidelined Nazarbayev after the January 2022 unrest, which left hundreds dead and drew a Russian-led peacekeeping force, and which both Tokayev and outside observers linked to Nazarbayev loyalists trying to take back power. Dissolving Amanat into a party run by the president’s own people retires the last large structure carrying the founding president’s name. The pro-presidential bloc is being reorganised from above, before a vote whose main contenders all back the president.