Last week, the stars were pointing toward a snap parliamentary election in Kazakhstan. Today, President Nursultan Nazarbayev has set the date for January 15, dissolving parliament and bringing elections six months forward.

Nazarbayev cited as his top reason the need to replace Kazakhstan’s one-party parliament with a multiparty legislature. Nur Otan, the party he leads, held all elected seats in the now-dissolved rubberstamp parliament. 
At a meeting with officials on November 15, Nazarbayev said legislative amendments ruling out a future one-party parliament need to be enacted, so parliament must be dissolved. He did not explain why it had taken him three years to reach this conclusion – those reforms were introduced in 2008. 
The likeliest explanation is that Astana is thinking ahead as it mulls the thorny issue of the succession to Nazarbayev, who has been in power for three decades.
After Kazakhstan’s snap presidential election last April, in which 71-year-old Nazarbayev won 95.5 percent of the vote, the early parliamentary poll looks like another jigsaw piece to slot into place as Astana’s gray cardinals plot a succession strategy.
Favorite to win parliamentary seats is the Ak Zhol party led by Azat Peruashev, an associate of the president’s son-in-law Timur Kulibayev. Kulibayev is often tipped as a possible successor.
Genuine opposition parties are unlikely to win seats, and an early vote knocks two of them out of the race: the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, whose activities were suspended by a court for six months in October, and the unregistered Alga! party, viewed with disfavor by Astana for its ties to London-based oligarch and Nazarbayev opponent Mukhtar Ablyazov. 
Alga! has been unable to register to operate legally, but leader Vladimir Kozlov had planned to form a new party, Khalyk (People), to fight the next election. Now, he told EurasiaNet.org just after news of the early election broke, he won’t have time to clear the legal hurdles.
So the scene is set for Nur Otan to win a landslide victory, and a tame opposition party loyal to Astana to cozy up alongside in a “multiparty” – but still rubberstamp – parliament.