A former government official and one-time activist, Sanzhar Bokayev, announced last week that he is founding a political party that will work to build a Kazakhstan “based on justice and where the country is led by decent and honest people.”

Bokayev, who turns 40 next month, is still having to convince the public, however, that he is the real deal and that he is not doing the bidding of elite figures favoring the status quo. 

On paper, he is certainly talking the language of political change.

“The existing political parties do not reflect our interests, because they were created from above and protect the interests of the authorities and oligarchs,” he told reporters at a February 17 press conference.

The party that Bokayev proposes to form is called Namys. In a departure from tradition, the plan is for Namys to operate primarily as an online entity – an echo of experiments in digital democracies pursued in the last decade in Sweden, Germany and Iceland, and perhaps most successfully, in electoral terms, by Italy’s Five Star Movement.

The chairman of Namys, which means “honor” in Kazakh, will be elected remotely by its members, Bokayev said.

While Namys’ branding may be novel, its platform is redolent of proposals routinely made by existing pocket parties, whose presence in parliament mainly serves to create the illusion of political diversity. The reforms it proposes include the promotion of an independent judiciary, overhauling law enforcement structures, combating corruption, optimizing governance, broadening access to quality healthcare, and more jobs for young people.

If it intends to get into parliament, though, Namys will have to be registered. If the party is committed to robust and rough criticism of the government, experience suggests it will not be successful. As things now stand, only pliable parties are officially registered, let alone allowed into parliament.

As for joining Namys, Bokayev promises this is the most exciting and innovative aspect of his initiative. Aspiring members will, if Namys is registered, need to download an application and can then give their consent with a few clicks.

Bokayev first came to prominence for his pro-motorist activism. Between 2012 and 2014, having caught the eye of the government, he ran the youth affairs department at Almaty city hall, and was eventually made head of the city hall’s internal policy department. In November 2015, he was appointed a senior advisor to the chairman of natural gas transportation company KazTransGaz. He has also served as deputy chairman of the Almaty branch of the ruling Nur Otan party, a detail in his biography that has fed the skepticism over his turn to opposition politics.

In an interview with Dmitry Dubovitsky, a YouTube political commentator, Bokayev sought to dispel rumors like the one that has him as a catspaw for Dariga Nazarbayeva, the MP daughter of former President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Bokayev said he was not backed by any officials or major businesspeople and that he intends to finance the $100,000 or so that it will take to register Namys out of his own pocket.

“If [officials and businessmen] provide financing, then the party will cease to be popular, because it will be advancing their interests,” Bokayev said.

As to whether he could even secure registration, Bokayev said that he was prepared to gamble the money on an experiment to find out whether it was possible to create a party “from below.” He admitted that current registration rules are “draconian” and “unrealistic.”

Under current rules, aspiring party founders must gather 20,000 signatures of support and establish branches in every region. That threshold is part of the reason that no new political party has been registered in Kazakhstan for the past 10 years. At the moment, there are six registered parties – of those, three are represented in the lower house of parliament, which is known as the Majilis. Fully 76 seats in the 107-member chamber are held by Nur Otan. The other parties are state-engineered cutouts: The ostensibly business-oriented Ak Zhol party has 12 seats and the Socialist-lite People’s Party, which was designed to cater to communist nostalgia, has 10 members. Another nine members are in effect hand-picked presidential appointees.