Summary

Tuesday brought surprising news from Central Asia: President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the all-powerful figure who has ruled Kazakhstan since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is stepping down from the presidency.

The revelation implies a game-changer for the region and beyond. Nazarbayev has ruled Kazakhstan for so long that the two have become synonymous in foreign policy circles. The decades-long Nazarbayev era rebuilt Kazakh society from the bottom up, transforming an ethnically fractured and impoverished Soviet hinterland into the largest and most successful economy in Central Asia. By way of example: Uzbekistan, a country with around five more million people, has an economy that’s roughly a quarter of the size of Kazakhstan’s.

Yet the more details of the president’s resignation emerged, the less it seemed like a seminal moment in Kazakhstan’s political development. Rather this looks more like a lateral move, with Nazarbayev exerting the pervasive influence he always has, just from a different institutional perch.