Published by Akorda on Monday afternoon and in force from publication, the decree carries one instruction: the Central Election Commission is to take all measures to call, prepare and hold early elections of maslikhat deputies at every level. The text as Akorda published it names no election date and carries no number. Tokayev signed it after a morning meeting with prime minister Olzhas Bektenov and Kurultai chairman Aibek Dadebay, the step article 88 sets before a president ends a council’s term.
The fifth paragraph of article 88, the constitution’s article on local councils, says a maslikhat’s powers end early by the president’s decision after consultations with the prime minister and the chairman of the Kurultai, or by the council’s own vote to dissolve itself. Written in the singular, the clause names a maslikhat, and Monday’s decree, titled on the early termination of the powers of maslikhats of all levels, applies it to every council in the country at once.
The text as Akorda published it names no election date and carries no number.
Tokayev gave the reason on 24 September, at the first session of the Khalyk Kenesi, the people’s council that opened that month. The overwhelming majority of maslikhat deputies were elected from Amanat, he said, and that party no longer acts on its own, having joined Adilet, so once the formalities are complete the mandate of most deputies will be open to question. Elections at every level would be the final stage of the transformation of the state, he said, and would open the way to a qualified and professional corps of deputies, in his phrase.
The election law fixes the clock. Under article 101 of the constitutional law on elections, early elections of maslikhats whose powers have been ended are called by the commission on the basis of the president’s decree and held no later than two months from the day the powers ended. From Monday that runs to 12 December, a Saturday, and Kazakhstan’s recent national votes have all fallen on Sundays, which puts the last Sunday inside the window at 6 December, by CAW’s reading of the calendar.
The commission had already redrawn the map, eight days after the president announced the dissolution and ten before he signed it. By a resolution of 2 October it set how many seats each council gets by population, from at least ten deputies in a district of up to 15,000 residents to at least 30 in Astana and the cities of republican significance, Tengrinews reported on 9 October: Aktobe gets 30 seats, Taraz 28, Semey 22 and the new city of Alatau 11, counted from the statistics bureau’s population on the day the election is called.
The councils being dissolved were elected on 19 March 2023 for five years, in the same vote that filled the Mazhilis of the old constitution. Monday cuts their term by about seventeen months.
What goes with the councils is written in the same article 88: they approve the territory’s development plans and programmes, the local budget and the reports on its execution, and hear the heads of local executive bodies. Local budgets for 2027 are adopted after the republican budget passes, in December as a rule, so the date the commission picks decides whether the new councils are elected into their first budget sitting or the regions reach it without a council.
On Monday, by Akorda’s Telegram as Zakon.kz relayed it, Tokayev spoke of the councils’ full work on local budgets and the control of regional development and said a renewed body of deputies would strengthen them. Neither that text nor the September speech says what changes in how a deputy is chosen, and no share for Amanat’s 2023 seats appears in either.
The party map is the stated ground. Amanat, the former ruling party, took the bulk of the 2023 maslikhat seats, and its joining Adilet, the party under whose list the Kurultai was elected this year, is the event the president says undermines the councils’ standing, though the deputies themselves have not changed.
The commission’s resolution on the date is the next document, and the sitting at which the new councils would adopt 2027’s local budgets is the first deadline it must clear. Until it is signed, Kazakhstan’s regions, cities and districts run with their akims and without the councils that sign off on their money.
Update, 14 October: The Central Election Commission called the elections for Sunday 29 November at its sitting on 13 October, inside the 12 December limit. Nomination of candidates opens on 14 October and closes at 18:00 on 27 October. Seven of the eight registered parties are admitted, and Amanat, whose deputies held most of the seats, wrote to the commission that it will not take part.
Update, 16 October: the Central Election Commission set the elections for Sunday 29 November at its sitting on 13 October, within the 12 December limit, and Amanat wrote to the commission that it will not take part.