For much of the three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan appeared to have settled on a straightforward political bargain. The state would provide stability, rising living standards and access to the riches generated by oil, uranium and minerals. In return, political change would be slow and power would remain concentrated at the top.
That bargain is being rewritten.
Under President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Kazakhstan has embarked on the most substantial overhaul of its institutions since independence in 1991. The transformation is neither revolutionary nor complete. Kazakhstan is not becoming a Western liberal democracy overnight, and critics can point to continuing restrictions on political opposition and the press.
But dismissing the changes as cosmetic misses something important.
Over the past four years, presidential powers have been revised, the Constitutional Court restored, local democracy expanded, judicial structures reformed and restrictions designed to prevent nepotism at the summit of the state introduced. The death penalty has been abolished. The Human Rights Commissioner has received constitutional status. Economic reforms are attempting to reduce the dominance of the state and a small number of entrenched interests.
A new constitution, which came into force this summer, has now opened another phase in that transformation.
Kazakhstan is attempting something relatively rare in its part of the world: controlled liberalisation without political collapse.
Breaking With the Old Kazakhstan
The dividing line was January 2022.
What began as protests over fuel prices spread rapidly across Kazakhstan and descended into the most serious violence since independence. More than 200 people died.
The crisis exposed deep frustrations over inequality, corruption and the concentration of economic power that had developed during the long presidency of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who ruled the country for nearly three decades.
Tokayev, originally regarded as Nazarbayev’s chosen successor, emerged from the upheaval increasingly independent of his predecessor.
The political language changed accordingly.
“New Kazakhstan” became the shorthand for a state that would be less dependent on personal relationships, monopolies and powerful families. Tokayev introduced a single presidential term, strengthened Parliament and barred the president from belonging to a political party while in office. Close relatives of the president were prohibited from occupying senior political and public-sector positions.
These may sound like technical adjustments. In the context of post-Soviet Central Asia, they are not.
The OECD concluded in its 2025 review of Kazakhstan that significant governance reforms had been implemented since 2022, including decentralisation of executive functions, greater authority for ministries and local government and measures intended to strengthen the accountability of the state.
Perhaps more significant is the changing relationship between ordinary citizens and government.
Direct elections of rural mayors have widened local political participation. Citizens can now bring constitutional questions directly before the restored Constitutional Court. Administrative reforms have made it easier to challenge decisions made by public authorities.
The principle is simple but consequential: the state should increasingly have to justify itself to the citizen, rather than the other way around.
The Courts Begin to Matter
Nowhere is that evolution more important than in the judiciary.
Kazakhstan inherited a legal culture in which prosecutors enjoyed enormous power and courts were often regarded as extensions of the state. Reforms have sought gradually to change that balance.
Changes introduced since 2023 have strengthened the Supreme Judicial Council, altered procedures for judicial appointments and introduced elements of election for some senior judicial positions.
The system remains imperfect. International observers, including the OECD, continue to question whether judicial governance is sufficiently independent of the presidency.
Yet courts have increasingly demonstrated a willingness to produce outcomes that are inconvenient to powerful interests.
The long-running dispute involving businessman Dinmukhamet Idrisov provides one illustration.
Idrisov, one of Kazakhstan’s wealthiest businessmen, had argued that he lost interests in the gold producer AltynEx following a 2018 settlement reached amid a criminal investigation. A lower court rejected his attempt to invalidate the transactions in 2023.
That might once have been the end of the story.
Instead, Idrisov appealed—and won an important reversal.
In 2024, an Almaty appeals court concluded that legal requirements governing the transfer of rights connected to the mining company had not been respected and invalidated a series of transactions. The case continued to generate litigation afterwards, but Kazakhstan Stock Exchange records at the beginning of 2026 listed Idrisov once again as the owner of 26.1 per cent of AltynEx.
The point is not that Idrisov was necessarily right in every allegation he made. Nor does one billionaire’s victory prove that Kazakhstan possesses an independent judiciary.
It demonstrates something subtler.
A wealthy businessman could challenge a decision, lose, appeal, obtain a reversal and recover a substantial corporate interest through legal mechanisms. The courts, rather than informal political arbitration, became the arena in which the fight was conducted.
For a country trying to replace personalized power with institutions, that distinction matters.
Opening the Economy
The same transition is taking place economically.
Kazakhstan remains extraordinarily rich in natural resources. It is the world’s largest uranium producer, possesses enormous oil reserves and sits geographically between China, Russia and Europe.
But that model has limitations.
Tokayev’s government has increasingly emphasized competition, private investment, digitalisation and diversification away from excessive dependence on commodities and state-controlled enterprises.
The World Bank this year backed the reform programme with a $600 million operation intended to strengthen private-sector-led growth, reduce market distortions and improve access to finance.
Kazakhstan is also becoming more strategically important to Europe.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dramatically increased interest in the Middle Corridor—the trade route connecting China and Central Asia with Europe across Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea and the South Caucasus.
Astana has simultaneously maintained relations with Moscow, expanded links with Beijing and deepened economic and political engagement with Europe and the United States.
It is a balancing act that Tokayev, a former diplomat, appears unusually comfortable performing.
Liberalisation Has Limits
None of this makes Kazakhstan a liberal democracy.
Human Rights Watch continues to document restrictions on peaceful assembly, political organisation and freedom of expression. The 2024 media law attracted criticism for expanding government powers over journalists and online publications.
And the political reforms of 2026 are contested.
The new constitution created a vice-presidency and replaced the two-house legislature with a smaller unicameral parliament. Supporters describe the system as more streamlined and accountable. Critics argue that the changes may ultimately consolidate presidential authority.
The parliamentary election held this month reinforced those concerns. The new pro-presidential Adilet party won a commanding majority, while the smaller parties entering parliament are not generally regarded as representing a fundamental challenge to Tokayev.
This is therefore liberalisation with a large asterisk.
But the relevant comparison is not Denmark or Britain. It is Kazakhstan itself a decade ago—and, to some extent, its Central Asian neighbours.
Against that measure, the direction of travel is significant.
A Different Kind of Central Asian State
Kazakhstan’s experiment rests on a calculation: that political institutions can gradually become more open without sacrificing the stability that helped turn the country into Central Asia’s largest economy.
That approach will frustrate those demanding faster democratic change. It will also unsettle parts of the old economic establishment accustomed to a more personalised system.
But revolutions are not the only way countries change.
Sometimes institutions accumulate quietly: a Constitutional Court gains authority; a businessman wins an appeal against a powerful adversary; a village elects its own mayor; presidential relatives disappear from senior state positions; ministries acquire powers once concentrated around the presidency.
None is transformative on its own.
Together, they begin to describe a different country.
Kazakhstan remains a work in progress—more politically controlled than its reformist rhetoric sometimes suggests, but also more institutionally open than the caricature of an immutable Central Asian autocracy allows.
The real test will come when those new institutions produce outcomes the government itself does not like.
If they are allowed to stand, Kazakhstan’s quiet liberalisation may turn out to be considerably more consequential than it presently appears.
