Not only was the recent election more of the same, but Astana seems to have roped the same experts into praising it.

Kazakhstan’s ageing President Nursultan Nazarbayev said his oil-rich nation may become a parliamentary republic... but with his daughter at the helm.

Leader says Asia is about "family relations" not democracy as he vows to turn Kazakhstan into a parliamentary republic.

A handful of civil society campaigners staged a rare picket in Almaty on March 18, demanding freedom for a political activist sentenced to jail on incitement charges.

A former prime minister of Kazakhstan who was jailed last year in a high-profile corruption case has had his jail sentence reduced on appeal.

In many democratic systems, holding legislative elections amid spiraling inflation, a rapidly depreciating currency, sharp contractions in government expenditure and reports of job losses and delayed wages usually spells trouble for a governing party.

The president of Tajikistan was granted the title “Leader of the Nation” in December 2015 by special law. However, he does not want to stop there. On January 22, Tajikistan’s parliament adopted new amendments to the Constitution, which allow President Emomali Rahmon to run for an unlimited number of terms and also reduces the minimum age for presidential candidates to 30 from 35. This means that Rahmon’s elder son Rustam Emomali, now 28, will be able to run for the presidency when his father’s current term ends in 2020.

Earlier this week, Kazakhstan’s foreign minister attempted to lay out why Kazakhstan would be hosting snap parliamentary elections next month. “Strong leadership and a clear strategy ... to overcome the current economic climate,” according to Foreign Minister Erlan Idrissov, are the reasons that “President Nursultan Nazarbayev approved a parliamentary initiative to dissolve the lower house and call an early parliamentary election.

Kazakhstan’s president could hardly be expected to run for parliament, so the ruling Nur Otan party has gone for the next best thing: The actor who played him as a young man in the biopic.