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Politics

Tokayev will dissolve every maslikhat in Kazakhstan, and the councils that Amanat filled in 2023 go back to the polls on a date the election commission has yet to name

President Tokayev told the second day of the People’s Council’s first session on Thursday that the closing stage of the reforms will be elections to the maslikhats at every level: he will consult the prime minister and the Kurultai’s chairman shortly on ending the councils’ powers early, sign a decree, and leave the date to the Central Election Commission, Zakon.kz reported at 12:31. His reason is the party map. The great majority of maslikhat deputies were elected from Amanat, he said, and that party no longer acts on its own, having joined Adilet, so the question of the legitimacy of the greater part of the maslikhats’ deputy corps would arise.

By CAW Editorial24 September 2026
: A tall stack of identical blank brass desk nameplates on a pale table, the top one askew and catching an amber light.

Its mechanics are the constitution’s: sitting deputies keep their powers until they end “on the grounds provided by the Constitution and the laws”, in Tokayev’s words, and the route he intends to take is consultations, a decree and the commission’s calendar. Those councils were elected on 19 March 2023, on the same day as the last Mazhilis, for 5-year terms that would have run to 2028. The party that elected them no longer acts on its own, and the councils go with it.

The chamber he said it in is the one the maslikhats help to fill. A third of the People’s Council, Tokayev told the same session at 12:06, are the regions’ representatives, maslikhat deputies and members of public councils among them, and that is his answer to the question he posed himself, whether the regions will be heard after the Senate ends: “there is no cause for concern; the interests of the regions will now be brought to the central state bodies by the Kurultai and the People’s Council”. On Thursday the Council’s chairman, Yerlan Koshanov, elected on Wednesday by 120 votes to 1, gave it 2 deputy chairmen by order under the constitutional law, Dmitry Ostankovich and Lyazzat Chinkisbayeva, Kazakhstan Today reported at 13:10.

The party that elected them no longer acts on its own, and the councils go with it.

The commission that will set the date was itself reshaped on Wednesday, when the Kurultai consented to 6 of its members along with the Constitutional Court’s judges and the audit chamber’s members, and the maslikhat vote will be that commission’s nationwide test. Tokayev has given it no season. His word for the consultations’ timing was “shortly”, and the decree, the campaign and the vote are the commission’s arithmetic once it is signed.

What ends with the councils is the last layer of elected office from before the new constitution. The Senate is gone under it, the Kurultai sits in the bicameral parliament’s place, the People’s Council sat for the first time this week, and the maslikhats, from the regions down to the districts, were the one tier still holding mandates won under Amanat’s name. Tokayev’s sentence on legitimacy is the reason given; the effect is a country with no council anywhere that predates the second republic, once the commission has named the day.

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