Turan Research Center

On March 15, Kazakhstan passed a new constitution, with preliminary results showing more than 87% of voters cast in favor of the new basic law.

A previous constitutional referendum held in 2022 marked the end of a devastatingly mismanaged transition between the Central Asian country’s first and second independence-era leaders.  

Now, the signs point to a new choreographed handover of power. 

But after President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev abruptly reversed course on when the plebiscite would be held, can his earlier pledges not to seek office after his term ends in 2029 still be taken at face value?

From Tweak To Overhaul 

When Tokayev first broached the topic of further constitutional changes during his annual address last September, the scope was narrow: a restructuring of the legislature from bicameral to a single chamber. He proposed holding the plebiscite in 2027 and stressed that there should be no “hurry” over discussions or drafting.

Four months later, the picture changed entirely. Speaking in the city of Qyzylorda on January 20, Tokayev said the proposal had generated “a huge response” from citizens, who had been able to submit suggestions through a public petitions website. A far greater overhaul was now required, he added.  

“In fact, we intend to take a step comparable to the adoption of a [completely] new Constitution,” he told his audience, unveiling a sweeping set of changes to the architecture of government and elections.

What followed was a constitutional sprint. A first draft appeared on January 31 — just ten days after a constitutional commission was formally appointed to supersede the earlier working group. On February 11, Tokayev announced the date for the plebiscite. The finalized text was published the next day. 

Since more than 80 percent of the existing basic law’s text has been altered, the basic law has been treated as a replacement of the 1995 constitution, as opposed to the mere amendments passed in 2022. Speaking on the night of the vote, Tokayev declared March 15 Constitution Day, and said that the new constitution could be considered “among the most progressive” in the world.

The referendum's structural conditions — limited space for public debate or a ‘no’ campaign, a compressed drafting timeline, and an administrative push in favor — meant the outcome was largely predictable.

What remains less clear, however, are the underlying objectives. Beyond the changes on the ballot, significant questions remain about what the overhaul is designed to achieve, why its scope expanded so dramatically, and why the timeline accelerated so sharply.

The Shadow of the Super-President

One reason for the haste — beyond a more general desire to pre-empt opposition — may be Tokayev’s concerns regarding his still-active 85-year-old predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbayev. 

Nazarbayev governed Kazakhstan for three decades before only partially ceding power to his hand-picked protégé in 2019. As Tokayev attempted to consolidate power, the rivalry between their respective camps laid the groundwork for the worst unrest in the country’s post-independence history in January 2022. The events of Qandy Qantar (‘Bloody January’ began with peaceful anti-government protests in the West of the country following an overnight spike in the cost of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). But by the time Tokayev announced that he had given state troops a “shoot to kill” order, the unrest had become far more violent.

Two nephews of the former president, Samat Abish and Kairat Satybaldy, were widely rumored to have played a driving and destabilizing role during the violence that left at least 238 people dead, many civilians. Abish, a former deputy of the security services, received an eight-year suspended sentence in a trial believed to be directly connected to the events. But he spent no time in incarceration, and the details of the trial were hidden from the public. His brother, Satybaldy, spent over two years in jail after being convicted of extortion, becoming the first and only close blood relative of the former president to be placed behind bars. Released into a probationary sentence in 2024, investigators had initially stated that Satybaldy was being additionally probed for crimes “undermining the security of the state.” There was no indication that he was ever charged with such crimes. According to the Anti-Corruption Agency of Kazakhstan, he was forced to return $1.5 billion to the state.

Ultimately, ‘Bloody January’ was a turning point for Tokayev’s presidency. His decision to invite a Russia-led peacekeeping contingent to help restore order appeared to shift a divided political elite decisively towards him — and away from his former patron.

Yet despite resigning all formal political positions and styling himself as “just a pensioner” after the unrest — and despite vocally backing Tokayev and the new constitution when casting his ballot in Astana on March 15 — Nazarbayev’s capacity to disrupt should not be underestimated.

The octogenarian is, after all, still the patriarch of Kazakhstan's wealthiest family network. His three daughters by his official wife Sara Nazarbayeva — Dariga, Dinara, and Aliya — have not faced prosecution at all. Dariga, a former high-ranking politician, who was once seen as a possible successor to Nazarbayev, appeared in public in Kazakhstan in 2023 along with the ex-president at the funeral of Nazarbayev’s younger brother, Bolat. The event was attended by dozens of former top officials, in what one commentator called a “who’s who of Old Kazakhstan.” Middle daughter Dinara Kulibayeva and her husband Timur Kulibayev are still majority stakeholders in the country’s largest bank, Halyk. Nazarbayev’s youngest daughter, Aliya Nazarbayeva, was spared investigation even though a monopolist recycling company founded in her name was at the center of a grand corruption trial that saw its official leadership receive sentences of between two and seven years imprisonment, also in 2023.

The future well-being of Nazarbayev’s clan may have been on the agenda when he met at least twice with Russia’s Vladimir Putin last year. But it would be surprising if Kazakhstan’s political trajectory under Tokayev was not also discussed, particularly given that Moscow has made its displeasure with Astana’s neutral position on the Ukraine war loudly known through proxies. Russia Today Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan famously called Kazakhstan “ungrateful” for Russia’s intervention after Kazakh officials ruled out recognition of Russian-backed separatist territories in eastern Ukraine on the eve of the war. Duma Deputy Konstantin Zatulin went further a few months later, threatening“measures as [used] in Ukraine.”

What the New Constitution Actually Does

At an expanded government session last month, Tokayev described the new constitution, which enters force on July 1, as continuing the shift away from the "super-presidential system" established under his predecessor. As he described it, the country is "moving towards a presidential republic with an authoritative, influential parliament."

The constitutional text, however, presents a more complex picture.

The unrepeatable seven-year presidential term introduced in the 2022 constitutional amendments — a significant development in a region defined by “rulers for life” — is retained. But while the 2022 referendum curtailed certain powers and privileges, including those attached to Nazarbayev personally, the new constitution consolidates presidential authority over key institutional appointments.

Under the previous basic law, the legislature’s upper house had to agree the president’s appointments and dismissals of top prosecutors, national security chiefs, the chair of the Supreme Court, and the head of the central bank. Under the new constitution, such political appointments become the exclusive prerogative of the president.

The restructured, unicameral parliament — to be renamed the Kurultai — will seat 145 members elected by party lists.

The Kurultai will, however, have to share the political stage with an entirely new institution: the Peoples' Council or Halyk Kenesi. This body — composed of 16 members appointed by the president — will be empowered to introduce legislation into the Kurultai and even to propose referendums. Designated in the constitutional draft as a “supreme consultative organ,” the Halyk Kenesi appears positioned to carry considerably more institutional weight than the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan, a consultative body dissolved in the reform.

The new constitution also expands the grounds on which the president may dissolve the legislature and call fresh elections — including deadlocks over appointments that still require parliamentary consent, such as those of the prime minister and the newly created vice-president. Should the Kurultai be dissolved, the president would be entitled to govern by decree for up to two months.

Taken together, these provisions suggest that the trajectory of constitutional reform in Kazakhstan is not straightforwardly away from executive primacy, but rather toward a reconfigured form of it — one that raises questions about the incentive structures facing future incumbents as their unrepeatable terms approach their end.

The Succession Question

The reintroduction of the vice-presidency — an office dormant since 1996 — will attract the closest scrutiny from those who study elite politics in Astana. If Tokayev were to resign as Nazarbayev did in 2019, the vice-president would assume power, following a model familiar from the United States and elsewhere.

The question, then, is whether Tokayev is actually preparing to leave.

On balance, a voluntary departure still appears more likely than not. But the space for uncertainty has grown. The strongest argument that Tokayev might seek a new seven-year term — despite the constitution reaffirming that presidents cannot be re-elected — rests on the concept of obnuleniye — the Russian term for the formula through which leaders like Putin and Nazarbayev have used new constitutions to reset their term counts to zero. Ahead of the 2022 referendum, Tokayev issued an unambiguous pledge against this: "There are no such intentions, nor will there be." In January 2024, responding to what he called "disinformation" about a possible 2026 re-election bid, he reiterated his position in similarly firm terms. Yet an anonymous “Kazakh diplomatic source” told Reuters in February that a new term under the new constitution is a possibility — a disclosure that, whatever its accuracy, suggests at a minimum that Tokayev’s circle may see value in keeping multiple scenarios in play.

A parallel line of speculation concerns Tokayev’s future outside Kazakhstan entirely.

Earlier this year, he denied interest in returning to the United Nations, where he served as Under Secretary-General from 2011 to 2013. Rumors of a bid for the Secretary-General post —ahead of Antonio Gutteres’ tenure concluding at the end of this year — have nonetheless persisted. Tokayev would enter such a race with genuine assets: his mix of East-West diplomatic credentials and relationships across the Global South could make him an attractive consensus candidate, and U.S. President Donald Trump, China’s Xi Jinping, and possibly Russia’s Vladimir Putin would likely prefer him over other candidates currently in view.

His recent diplomatic activity has lent the UN speculation fresh plausibility. Kazakhstan joined the Abraham Accords last year, and Tokayev spent much of the first week of the new war between the Israel-U.S. coalition and Iran in intensive contact with Gulf leaders — including Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani of Qatar, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the UAE, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, and Haitham bin Tariq Al Said of Oman.

If the president and his team are allowing some ambiguity about his political future to persist, it is likely because they believe it strengthens their hand in the short to medium term and reduces “lame duck” risks.

Speculation over what comes next will almost certainly intensify after the first vice-president appointment is made after parliamentary elections, which are expected later this year.

What is clear for the moment is that the constitutional overhaul has concentrated formal power in the presidency while leaving the question of who will wield that power deliberately open. A political regime that once derived its stability from the certainty of Nazarbayev's permanence is now navigating a far more speculative era. 

Chris Rickleton is a journalist living in Almaty. Previously, he was a Central Asia correspondent for RFE/RL and the Central Asia bureau chief for Agence France-Presse. He is a graduate of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. 

As the summer burns hot and the tourism season in Kazakhstan nears its apogee, visitors are flocking to high-altitude areas near Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty. At the top of 3,200 meter-high Shymbulak Mountain Resort, just 25 kilometers from Almaty, the sight of fully-covered women strolling through nature with their families is a normal sight. A boom in tourism from the Gulf states may be partly driving that trend.

But such scenes may change now after President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed a decree in June making Kazakhstan the last country in Muslim-majority Central Asia to ban women from wearing the niqab in public.

The full-face veil worn by some Muslim women, which leaves only the eyes visible, was formally banned from public places in Uzbekistan in 2023, Tajikistan in 2024, and most recently, in Kyrgyzstan in February 2025.

No such law is needed in authoritarian Turkmenistan, where tightly-proscribed ethnic national attire is widely imposed on female government employees from teachers to news anchors.

But for many analysts, it is the hijab, not the niqab, that is more likely to determine future relations between secular governments and their fast-changing populations.

Governments Tout ‘Safe Cities’

In Kazakhstan, as in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, lawmakers justified these bans as a crime prevention measure, targeting clothing that restricts the identification of persons in public places. Kazakhstan allows exceptions for medical reasons, official duties, weather protection and during sports or cultural activities, but there are no exceptions based on religion. Unlike the other three Central Asian nations, where fines of hundreds of dollars are in place for violators, the Kazakh law is prophylactic, making no provisions for punishing violators, instead just issuing warnings.

Moreover, Central Asian nations have embraced Chinese-style facial recognition systems with enthusiasm in recent years. Tokayev, for instance, has not hidden his desire to see the technology more widely applied.  “We need to head in this direction,” he said after a 2019 trip to China.

Kazakhstan Ban: Long Time Coming

Calls for a ban on the niqab were common even before hundreds of Kazakh men, women and children fought in Iraq and Syria with such extremist groups as Islamic State and al Qaeda. Those groups imposed strict Islamic dress controls on women.

The appearance of Kazakh children assembling assault rifles and undergoing military training in a 2014 Islamic State propaganda video panicked the government, which blocked foreign news websites that covered the video.

Two years later, Kazakhstan suffered a rare  terror attack, after religious extremists went on a rampage in the western region of Aktobe, killing eight people and launching attacks on military targets.

Also in 2016, a lone gunman killed two civilians and eight police officers in Almaty, later citing what he called authorities’ mistreatment of religious believers as a motivation for his actions in his statement to the court. The shooter, Ruslan Kulekbayev, is now serving a life sentence as Kazakhstan banned the death penalty in 2021.

It was after those events that the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Civil Society was formed, which championed bans on face-covering veils. Then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev sought to prohibit “dark clothing”, long beards, and Arabic-style three-quarter length shorts in 2017. But by the time the ministry was disbanded in 2018, none of these restrictions had become law.

From thereon, official references to the dangers of “Salafism” – the fundamentalist revival movement within Sunni Islam – tapered off. Kazakhstan later won international plaudits after launching in 2019 “Operation Zhusan,” which allowed the return and reintegration of hundreds of Kazakh families formerly embedded with the Islamic State in Syria.

In the 2020 documentary on the operation by Kazakh filmmaker Kanat Beisekeyev ‘The Long Road Home,’ some of the returned women still covered their faces while giving interviews, describing children that they had lost as “martyrs.”

 “Many of [the women] have the same radical beliefs” as their husbands, who either died or were immediately jailed on their return to Kazakhstan, said Erlan Qarin, who helped oversee the effort and is now an influential official in Tokayev’s administration.

“Yes they betrayed their country and their people,” he added. But we need to give them a second chance. We’ll see how it goes.”

Kazakh authorities said that most returnees were not under criminal investigation. Only around a dozen women were convicted on terrorism charges over what authorities viewed as more active roles in the group’s operations, others completed rehabilitation and begun full reintegration into society by 2020. Media and international organizations have reported on individual cases and Tokayev has declared the process successful, however the government has not published a full report on the reintegration period.

The Hijab and Access to Public Education

The niqab was not commonly worn by Kazakh women even before its ban, with western regions like Aktobe among those where women sometimes donned the veil in public.

Hijabs – covering the neck and hair while leaving the face visible –– are a common sight across Kazakhstan. In contrast, the headscarf has long been at the heart of ongoing disputes, particularly regarding its role in educational settings.

Last year, the Kazakh Service of Radio Free Europe reported numerous cases where hijab-wearing schoolgirls were expelled from state schools, causing parents to sue school management. Local courts upheld the girls’ constitutional rights to education, noting that expulsions based on violations of school uniform policy “are not provided for under current [Kazakh] legislation.”

The schools appealed the rulings to the Supreme Court, still refusing to admit the girls to class. The high court then backed the Education Ministry’s right to determine school uniform guidance.  “Parents are responsible for complying with the School Charter and the requirements for the school uniform,” a Court statement read.

In Uzbekistan, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev offered an olive branch to pious Muslims during the start of his presidency, hinting at a break with the ultra-repressive policies of his predecessor Islam Karimov, who died in 2016.

Uzbek officials lifted the hijab ban  in public places in 2021, allowing a version of headscarves – tied behind the neck, not wrapped in front of it – in educational institutions. This thaw, however, hasn’t stopped periodic reports of police forcing men to shave their beards and raiding higher education institutions to enforce dress code regulations that the hijab apparently violates.

Kyrgyzstan remains the only country in the region where the traditional hijab is allowed in classrooms. At the beginning of the most recent school year, the Kyrgyz Education Ministry released a statement denying claims on social media that hijab-wearing girls had been prevented from attending schools.

That same week, a senior official in the State Commission on Religious Affairs reassured citizens that a ban on wearing the hijab would not be included in upcoming changes to legislation covering religious policy.

National Style vs. Personal Faith

Central Asian officials have often revealed their uneasy position towards the hijab by failing to mention it at all.

Months before signing the face covering ban, Tokayev said during a speech that it was preferable for women to wear “clothes in the national style” rather than “face-concealing black robes.”

In 2016, then-Kyrgyzstan President Almazbek Atambayev a controversial billboard campaign that promoted the traditional Kyrgyz elechek – a hair cap and long white fabric wrapped around the head like a turban — over the niqab. Billboards juxtaposed an image of women wearing all-encompassing veils with one of smiling Kyrgyz elders wearing the elechek — kimeshek in Kazakh. The text on the billboard read: “My poor people, where are we headed?”

Tajikistan’s ban on Islamic clothing last year referred to clothing “alien to the national culture.”

The law merely formalized repression of all “alien” Islamic clothing, including the hijab, that has de facto been systemic for many years.

But while Tajikistan has had success in cracking down on headscarves that the government views as foreign, it has done so without dialogue, arguably increasing the distance between the authoritarian regime of President Emomali Rahmon and an increasingly pious society.

In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which have both experienced political and social volatility in recent times, such mandated strict policies would likely cause more pushback.

While the niqab raises questions about compatibility with secular society, the hijab is already very much a part of it.

In Kazakh cities like Astana and Almaty, hijab-wearing girls and young women can regularly be seen walking and taking selfies with uncovered women, or attending football games with their partners.

Indeed, secularists often argue that, despite obvious employment discrimination against devout Muslims – Kazakh women committed to wearing hijabs typically cannot do so while working government jobs, – the hijab’s drift into popularity has been far too seamless.

That feeling was summed up by fallout online in 2023 after several female “influencers” with followings of 500,000 and more on social media platforms simultaneously covered up and began espousing religious lifestyles while retaining their penchant for glamour and luxury.

“The wish of several million-follower bloggers to completely change their lifestyles could of course be coincidental. But from the outside it looks like events are part of a marketing strategy,” said Gulnara Bazhkenova, the editor-in-chief of the news website, Orda.

When asked at a press conference about allegations that the influencers had received payments, a representative of the government-endorsed Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kazakhstan (SAMK) advised journalists against spreading “unsubstantiated claims” since doing so is “contrary to Sharia and Kazakh traditions.” In the past, the SAMK, a government-loyal body, has backed the government’s ban on the niqab, while pushing back against the idea that the hijab is a foreign implant.

The saga with the influencers explains why confrontations over the hijab in Central Asia have sticking power, and why for some of the region’s countries, government messaging about preferences for “national” clothes are unlikely to offer an effective counter.

The hijab is powerful not only as a symbol of devoutness and global Islamic identity.

At the same time, Central Asia’s secular governments, already perturbed about the rise of religious observance and political Islam among their populations, will not want to cede further ground to religiously conservative communities, who may in the future seek to challenge secular agendas.

Given this conflict of interests, standoffs over the hijab will likely continue, and replete with risk if mishandled.

Chris Rickleton is a journalist living in Almaty. Previously, he was a Central Asia correspondent for RFE/RL and the Central Asia bureau chief for Agence France-Presse. He is a graduate of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.