Nursultan Nazarbayev, who led Kazakhstan out of the collapse of the Soviet Union and who, over 30 years, built it into a more prosperous nation under an authoritarian state, stepped down as president in March at 78 years old, while still retaining considerable power. He may well have concluded that his retirement was the most efficient way to handpick a successor. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, his choice, became interim president and called for snap elections June 9. Mr. Tokayev promised in a televised address to the nation that Kazakhstan would have “free, transparent and fair elections.” He added, “This is my firm position.”

Or maybe not. Mr. Tokayev won 70.76 percent of the vote, while his nearest challenger, Amirzhan Kosanov, won only 16.2 percent. So goes the depressing march of autocracy. Mr. Nazarbayev was a skilled practitioner of these kind of elections; he won more than 90 percent of the vote in each of the past three presidential votes.

AD

AD

The hope for Kazakhstan was that Mr. Nazarbayev’s successor might permit real competition and allow free speech, association and democracy. If so, it would have been a watershed for Central Asia. Instead, the election was a farce, climaxed on election day by the detention of some 500 people who protested, shouting, “Shame! Shame!” in the capital, Nursultan (formerly Astana, recently renamed for Mr. Nazarbayev), and the largest city, Almaty.

Like so many modern authoritarian regimes, Kazakhstan figured out how to stage an election without really practicing democracy. According to a preliminary report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitored the election, “electoral preparations were efficiently administered,” including an extensive, door-to-door voter education program, and election day was “efficiently organized,” except for some ballot-box stuffing and falsification.

But the essential ingredients of political competition were absent. The OSCE found the process “tarnished by clear violations of fundamental freedoms as well as pressure on critical voices,” while “limits to peaceful assembly and expression inhibited genuine political pluralism,” with “limited space for civil society and opposition views,” and “sanctions, blocking of specific websites, and limited access to social networks on a daily basis, led to self-censorship and limited online political discourse.”

AD

AD

So much for Mr. Tokayev’s “firm” position. This was not a free, transparent and fair election. After it was over, Mr. Tokayev told the Wall Street Journal that he is a “reformer.” He added, “Without political transformation, Kazakhstan will not be a success story.” What matters are deeds, not more empty promises.