ALMATY -- A change in order to keep things the same.
Commentators local and foreign uttered various versions of this assessment after first President Nursultan Nazarbaev shocked his population in March 2019 with the announcement that he would be stepping down from a post he had held for almost three decades.
As he exited the office -- but not political life completely -- he ushered a loyal career diplomat with vast political experience into the role of head of state ahead of a snap presidential election.
The protests that accompanied incumbent Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev's victory on June 9 of that year were the biggest in Kazakhstan's history at the time, triggering thousands of detentions in the capital, Astana, and the largest city, Almaty.
But it was the much larger unrest in January 2022 -- leaving at least 238 people dead and featuring a stabilizing intervention from a Russia-led regional peacekeeping force -- that has defined his five-year presidency to date.
And with Toqaev pledging he will not run beyond 2029, when his current seven-year term ends, the question of whether his administration can avoid a repeat of those events in the second half of his reign remains ever-present.
'An Advocate Of Manual Control'
Even before the 2022 events popularly termed Bloody January, Toqaev has made subtle attempts to distance himself from Nazarbaev, who retained key leadership positions as well as the honorific "elbasy" -- leader of the nation -- all the way up until the protests.
In the first months of his presidency, Toqaev coined the phrase "the listening state" as a policymaking guideline.
If in English it carried unfortunate connotations of surveillance, the Russian and Kazakh equivalent was intended to convey a new responsiveness and, perhaps, an admission that authorities had not always heard its populace.
In 2020, he oversaw the passage of a new law governing freedom of assembly in a country where demonstrations were effectively illegal unless expressly permitted.
The new law was presented by his administration as a significant change, but international rights watchdog Human Rights Watch was unconvinced, calling it "hardly an improvement" on the old system.
That verdict proved correct, as four years later the government can still find a pretext to block a protest that might be viewed as politically sensitive.
Until administrative measures don't work, that is.
Bloody January began with protests over a sudden and dramatic increase in the cost of liquified petroleum gas in the western province of Mangystau, an oil-rich but economically depressed region.
The unrest subsequently spread to other parts of the country, becoming more broadly political and evolving into armed clashes that many observers attributed to a power struggle between relatives of the former president and his hand-picked successor, Toqaev.
And while Toqaev used the aftermath of the events to bring in a political era without Nazarbaev and his prominent family -- the focus of the protests as they spread -- he now carries the can of being the official who acknowledged issuing a "shoot to kill" order at the peak of the unrest.
"I said in 2019 that it was naive to expect him to break a system that he is a product of -- a system that, as a top official, he helped build," independent political analyst Dosym Satpaev told RFE/RL.
"Now, even the part of the population that believed in a reset in Toqaev's 'New Kazakhstan' sees that there has been no cleaning out of the inefficient bureaucracy, no cleaning out of oligarchs, that political repression continues, and that that there is no team of reformers surrounding the president," he said.
Yet the biggest problem of all, argues Satpaev, is the absence of strong institutions that might help the country weather a future crisis.
"Like Nazarbaev, Toqaev is an advocate of manual control. If Nazarbaev's system rested on four pillars -- the ruling family, the security bloc, the ineffective bureaucracy, and the oligarchs -- then Toqaev's system is exactly the same, just without the ruling family. You could even argue that from a regime perspective, a four-legged stool is more stable than a three-legged one."
Polling conducted last year by the German-funded, Almaty-based pollster Demoscope gave Toqaev a nearly 70 percent approval rating.
The same pollster found that 87 percent of citizens evaluated Nazarbaev's reign positively in 2019 after his resignation -- less than three years before the January unrest.
'Buffeted By Events'
Toqaev was only one of several top decision-makers at the time Bloody January struck, with Nazarbaev, now 83, confusingly retaining his "leader of the nation" title.
The former president's relatives were still prominent, and Nazarbaev proxies occupied top posts elsewhere in government.
Victory in the high-stakes political confrontation that the protests brought to a boil allowed him to become a president in more than just name.
That does not mean that his reign has not been disproportionately shaped by circumstances beyond his control, however.
This is particularly true when it comes to economic and foreign policy, experts say.
"Toqaev has inherited a very difficult economic position that has been made worse by recent events such as COVID, the war in Ukraine, and the global inflationary situation," said Ben Godwin, head of analysis at PRISM, a London-based strategic intelligence firm.
"While the government's plans on paper are quite sound, the reality of what it has had to do in terms of reacting to these crises, coupled with its fear of popular unrest, has meant that its handling of the economy has been far from ideal," he said.
Ultimately, deeper, liberalizing reforms as well as investment into aging energy infrastructure should have been enacted under Nazarbaev's presidency "during the commodities supercycle, i.e., before 2014," said Godwin, to achieve things that are harder to get in an economy where prices are rising, job creation is slow, and budget revenues are falling short, the analyst added.
But while authorities may feel "buffeted by events," what Godwin calls "fiscal pressure" on businesses is dimming investor interest in the Kazakh market.
In this regard, the most obvious red flag is the government's $150 billion challenge against investors operating Kashagan, one of the world's largest oil fields, noted Godwin.
"It's an extraordinarily large claim. Nobody will say that the Kashagan project has been an easy project. There have been huge delays and cost overruns. But the idea that you would sue investors for more than the project's build value sends a really negative message [to other investors]."
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and pursuant Western sanctions against Moscow, Astana's largest trading partner when the war broke out, has meant challenges for Kazakh diplomacy and the economy.
The Kremlin had likely expected instant repayment for its support to Toqaev and his team during the Bloody January crisis in the form of overt support for the war.
When that wasn't forthcoming, Russian pundits and lawmakers piled pressure on their neighbor, both for Astana's neutrality over the war and what they framed ominously as rising "Russophobia" in Kazakh society, sometimes openly questioning whether Kazakhstan and its multinational population might be "next."
For all that background noise, Astana has managed to balance its relations with China, Russia, and the West despite increasing geopolitical tensions in a reminder of Toqaev's strong suit.
Last month Toqaev -- the former foreign minister and ex-United Nations deputy secretary-general -- penned a hopeful opinion piece for the Euronews news agency on the role of "middle powers" like Kazakhstan in upholding international cooperation.
"Unburdened by the complexities of superpower politics, our agility enables us to navigate intricate diplomatic terrains and carve paths toward compromise and reconciliation," he wrote.
Time will tell if he can do the same at home.
