AQTOGHAI, Kazakhstan -- On a long, straight road through the Kazakh steppes, two signs point in different directions to places called Aqtoghai.
The one pointing to the right takes you to the Aqtoghai open-cast copper mine -- a concentration of mineral wealth controlled by the Kaz Minerals mining company.
The other one, going straight, shows the way to the settlement of Aqtoghai, a small town full of poverty and problems in the northeastern Abai Province.
Like scores of similar-sized settlements, Aqtoghai held village elections this fall -- part of an experiment in representative democracy in small towns and villages in Kazakhstan that began in 2021 and has since been extended to larger towns and provincial districts.
Yet for Aqtoghai, the experience was an unhappy one and, according to critics, is very telling of the limits of a democratic experiment in a system that lacks tolerance for independent players.
"The elections don't work because the government completely controls them," Dimash Alzhanov, a political analyst based in Almaty, told RFE/RL in an interview. "Political life has been completely sterilized."
When A Victory Is Not A Victory
The November 4-5 weekend brought more local elections -- 45 to be precise -- in provincial districts and small towns.
According to a postmortem published by the independent media outlet Vlast.kz, 29 of the victors were incumbent "hakims" -- or mayors -- while a further 12 were serving in deputy-mayor positions before the vote, essentially winning promotions.
Only three winning candidates -- all businesspeople -- came from outside the existing system of local government.
Aqtoghai's local election was held earlier, but bitterness over the outcome remains.
People walk past a board with official campaign posters of the upcoming parliamentary and regional elections in Almaty, but no "experiments" will take place there soon.
In the build-up to the vote, there was a great desire to oust Mayor Zair Kesikbaev.
A WhatsApp chat in which roughly one-sixth of the settlement's 6,000 people were participating teemed with complaints about everything from waste management to the lacking water supply and absent infrastructure.
A particular sore point was the town's sparse health services.
Just a week before the September 17 election, a 29-year-old resident of Aqtoghai died on a slow train to Ayagoz, the district center, after doctors in Aqtoghai found themselves without the medical equipment needed to treat him.
The journey by road would have been faster, the man's brother explained in an interview with the local media outlet Semey Ainasy, but the man's family feared that the battered condition of the roads between the two settlements made the risk too great.
Aqtoghai residents had earlier formed an informal "public council" to address their problems, and several members of this group threw their names into the hat to do battle with Kesikbaev and his deputy, Dinara Shangereeva, both of whom were competing in the vote.
But in the end, the group coalesced around a single candidate, Dastan Aubakirov, a 36-year-old with no experience in government but fresh from managerial experience in Kazakhstan's private pensions sector.
Dastan Aubakirov, independent candidate for the mayor of Aqtoghai, thought he'd won the election.
Official voting protocols showed that Aubakirov won by a landslide, scoring 698 votes to Kesikbaev's 364 and leaving Shangereeva in the dust with 72 votes.
But something was clearly wrong. Despite the publication of the protocols, no winner was announced by the local election commission.
And when local activist Ilyas Aqpanbet made a phone call to the commission, he got an ominous response. "They told me that many violations had been identified...and that the results would be annulled," he told RFE/RL's Kazakh Service.
Election officials later said the reason for that decision was that many of the voters were not registered in Aqtoghai.
Aubakirov, meanwhile, was under pressure not to compete in the rerun of the vote. "I was invited to talks with the hakim of the district, the district chief of staff, and the chairman of the commission," Aubakirov recalled.
"They let me know that I would not be allowed to work, that I wouldn't get finances," he told RFE/RL's Kazakh Service. "But in the end, I made the decision [not to run again] myself because I didn't want to have to work with the same people that I was arguing with."
Aqtoghai held repeat elections on October 12 and although a chastened Kesikbaev was not on the ballot -- a new "system" candidate had emerged in his place.
On election day, Nurkenzhe Gabidullin, a school director and a candidate for the ruling party -- now called Amanat, but formerly known as Nur Otan and which has dominated political life in Kazakhstan for more than 20 years -- defeated Shangereeva in a two-horse race.
In an interview with RFE/RL's Kazakh Service, the Ayagoz district chief of staff denied putting pressure on Aubakirov to withdraw his candidacy.
'Competitive Elections'
Speaking in September, presidential adviser Erlan Karin said that competitive elections in the provinces had become "a familiar, integral element of the political process in our country." He added that the elections were a new development not just for Kazakhstan, but Central Asia as a whole.
"Almost every Sunday, elections are held in one or another region," he said.
Direct elections are not yet held for the governorships of provinces or the mayorships of big cities, despite growing demand for such elections in the capital, Astana, and largest city, Almaty.
Last year, Deputy Justice Minister Alma Mukanova said direct elections would be "gradually" expanded in order to avoid "the risk of a populist character."
"Considering that we are now talking about decentralization [of power] and strengthening the regions, it is necessary to carry out this transition to decentralization very carefully," she explained.
Was Dastan Aubakirov considered to be a "risk of a populist character"? Whatever the answer, the results of the November 5 elections suggest that even fewer independents are winning compared to the elections of July 25, 2021.
Back then, 75 of the more than 700 winners in local elections were self-nominated independents, as the Nur-Otan party mopped up.
Two weeks before the November 5 vote, RFE/RL correspondents travelled to Oiyl, a district of some 16,000 people in the northwestern Aqtobe Province, some 260 kilometers from Aqtobe city.
The trip took more than three hours, and Oiyl residents complained that the road had got worse in recent years -- a point reinforced when a truck carrying hay broke down after hitting a crater on the way back.
Roughly half of Oiyl's working-age population is engaged in agriculture, while others in the district struggle to find any work. In one shop, a shopkeeper showed RFE/RL a notepad full of IOUs from customers and complained that his list of debtors was lengthening.
"What will these elections give us?" asked Sanim Sauyrbaeva, a woman sweeping the street in the district center. "Everyone knows who the mayor will be. Personally, I will not go to the polls. I never went to them. Nothing will change anyway. Look at us cleaning the streets. We have no permanent jobs," she told RFE/RL's Kazakh Service.
Sauyrbaeva's prediction was accurate. Oiyl's district chief since 2019, Askar Kazybaev, representing the ruling Amanat party, won a fresh four-year term.
Aqtobe Province Governor Askhat Shakarov congratulated Kazybaev on his victory at a formal presentation in Oiyl on November 7. Oiyl's economy was "developing steadily today thanks to the execution of the president's instructions," Shakarov claimed, according to comments reported by Gurk.kz. "Residents of the Oiyl district made their choice by actively taking part in the vote."
Not that there was a lot of choice on offer. Kazybaev's two competitors were effectively his subordinates.
One of them, Arslanbek Aldiyar, the chief specialist of Oiyl district's veterinary department, told RFE/RL that he was running in the election because "everyone wants to see themselves at the top."
"There is nothing special about elections for me. I understand that local government is a great responsibility," Aldiyar said.
The other candidate, Aibek Sultanov, made no secret of the fact that the suggestion for him to join the race had come from the Oiyl district administration itself. But Sultanov insisted he was no stalking horse. Rather he was going for a "promotion," he said, mindful of the fact that his own mandate as hakim of the village of Karaoi -- a village inside Oiyl district, runs out next year.
Results showed that Sultanov came closest to unseating Kazybaev, racking up 2,154 votes compared to the incumbent's 3,742 votes and the 943 votes garnered by Aldiyar. A further 141 votes were cast "against all."
After an October 24 campaign event at which Kazybaev read out his election manifesto in front of a standing audience of teachers, he told RFE/RL's Kazakh Service that he wanted to "finish what was started" in terms of infrastructural improvements in Oiyl district.
Askar Kazybayev (sixth from the left), a ruling Amanat party candidate running to head the Oyil district, campaigns at a school in Oyil village on October 24.
A priority would be extending gas lines to two unconnected villages in the district, he said, but stressed that it would depend on how much finance was provided to his office by Aqtobe's provincial administration.
That dependence on the presidentially nominated provincial governors is a big part of the problem, argues Alzhanov, the analyst critical of official claims of decentralization. Kazakhstan's political system is "still based on the Soviet legacy of administrative divisions, and the administration of President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev was unwilling to undertake genuine reform," he said.
The end result is "formal elections on top of an authoritarian and centralized system," Alzhanov remarked.