Pro-Presidential Adilet Party Wins Landslide in Kazakhstan's First Kurultai Vote

Kazakhstan went to the polls on Sunday to elect all 145 members of the Kurultai, a newly created single-chamber parliament that permanently replaces the country's former two-chamber legislature. Preliminary results announced by the Central Election Commission on Monday showed the pro-presidential Adilet party had won 71.17 percent of the vote, with turnout at just over 74 percent of the country's 12.6 million registered voters. Four smaller parties joined Adilet in clearing the 5-percent threshold required for representation, meaning five parties in total will hold seats in the new parliament. The vote further consolidates the political dominance of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, whose government says the new institutional architecture modernizes the state, while international observers and independent monitors say the contest excluded genuine opposition and unfolded amid mounting pressure on journalists and civil society.

A Commanding Win, Five Parties Enter the Kurultai

According to preliminary figures announced by the Central Election Commission, Adilet took 71.17 percent of the vote, or 6,528,948 ballots. Four smaller parties also crossed the 5-percent threshold: Auyl with 6.26 percent (574,621 votes), Respublica with 5.56 percent (509,631), the Ak Zhol Democratic Party with 5.21 percent (478,083), and the Nationwide Social Democratic Party with 5.11 percent (469,058). The People's Party of Kazakhstan, which had held seats in the outgoing parliament, fell short with 3.11 percent, as did the Baitak Green Party with 1.07 percent. Turnout was calculated at 74.08 percent of 9,351,539 voters who cast ballots out of 12,623,289 registered. The commission said final, certified results are due within seven days, meaning both the vote shares and the eventual seat allocation remain preliminary.

The 74.08 percent turnout figure updates an initial estimate of 74.19 percent reported when polling stations closed, a normal refinement as counting continued. Turnout varied significantly by region: The Astana Times reported that, according to CEC data, turnout topped 80 percent in the Akmola and Abai regions — reaching 82.69 percent and 81.41 percent, respectively — and exceeded 76 percent in the North Kazakhstan and Kostanai regions.

All 145 seats were allocated through closed party lists in a single nationwide constituency, rather than through the mixed system of party lists and individual constituency races used in the previous parliament. Under the 2026 amendments to Kazakhstan's electoral law, candidates could only be nominated by registered political parties from among their own members; the right to run as an independent candidate, which existed under the previous system, was eliminated entirely.

Kazakhstan Kurultai election preliminary results 2026

From Two Chambers to One: The Road to the Kurultai

Sunday's vote was the practical conclusion of a constitutional overhaul that Tokayev initiated in 2025 to, in his stated aim, modernize and optimize the country's system of governance. Citizens approved the resulting charter in a referendum on March 15, 2026: according to the Central Referendum Commission's official resolution, 87.15 percent of the 9,127,192 citizens who took part — 73.12 percent of the 12,482,613 eligible — voted in favor.

The new constitution, which took effect July 1, 2026, abolished the Senate and merged the legislature into the single-chamber Kurultai, restored the previously vacant post of vice president — appointed by the president with the Kurultai's consent — and created a new consultative body, the People's Council (Halyk Kenesi), comprising 126 members appointed directly by the president: 42 representing ethnocultural associations, 42 representing other public associations and non-profit organizations, and 42 representing local representative bodies (maslikhats) and public councils, according to the OSCE's election observation mission. The constitution retained a single, non-renewable seven-year presidential term. However, after the referendum, Kazakhstan's Constitutional Court issued a ruling on July 7 interpreting that term-limit restrictions apply only to terms served under the new 2026 constitution, meaning Tokayev's prior terms under the 1995 constitution would not count against the new limit. On the day of the referendum, Tokayev told reporters that Kazakhstan's next presidential election would take place in 2029, as scheduled under the 1995 constitution.

The reform followed a political reset that Tokayev launched after unrest in January 2022, when protests over fuel prices escalated into nationwide violence. Kazakh authorities put the official death toll at 238, including 19 law-enforcement officers; human-rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have said the toll may have been higher and have criticized the government's investigation into the security forces' use of lethal force as inadequate. That crisis prompted the dissolution of the seventh parliament and a snap election to the previous lower chamber, the Mäjilis, in March 2023, in which the then-ruling Amanat party won 62 of 98 seats — 40 through party lists, where it received 53.9 percent of the vote, and 22 through single-mandate constituencies, which existed under the old system. Independent candidates won the remaining seven constituency seats.

A New Ruling Party's Rapid Assembly

The party that dominated Sunday's vote did not exist a year ago. Adilet held its founding congress in Astana on May 7, 2026, where delegates elected Aibek Dadebay — until May 5 the head of the Presidential Administration — as party chairman. Kazakhstan's Ministry of Justice officially registered the party on June 1. Eleven days later, delegates at the 26th congress of Amanat, the country's long-dominant ruling party, voted unanimously to seek a merger with Adilet; Adilet's own delegates approved Amanat's accession at a second congress on June 14. The reorganization did not transfer Amanat's membership automatically — individual members had to apply to join Adilet — and Amanat has since been undergoing formal liquidation. The merger made the newly formed Adilet the dominant contestant heading into the campaign that began just weeks later.

A Campaign Without Independent Candidates

Seven parties, all broadly supportive of Tokayev's policy agenda, were registered to contest the election, fielding a combined 545 candidates. In its interim report published August 7, the OSCE's election observation mission noted that all seven parties support the president's policies, and that "some ODIHR EOM interlocutors" said the absence of genuine opposition parties and of independent candidates reduces political participation and pluralism. The mission also reported that some interlocutors described pressure on dissenting voices as contributing to self-censorship, and that a new non-partisan movement, called 11M, launched in Almaty on July 27 to represent citizens who said they did not feel represented by any of the seven registered parties.

Domestic election monitoring by civil-society groups was also constrained. According to the OSCE mission's interim report, Kazakhstan's 2026 legal amendments initially prompted several state institutions to interpret the law as excluding any observer organization that received foreign funding from accreditation, regardless of whether that funding was tied to election-related work; during the campaign, following formal requests from two observer organizations, the Central Election Commission clarified that foreign funding does not by itself disqualify an organization, and that each case would be assessed individually. Some organizations told the mission that the earlier uncertainty had discouraged them from pursuing accreditation. As of early August, 13 organizations were accredited at the national level and 247 at the local level to observe the vote.

Journalists Under Pressure

The campaign period coincided with a series of documented cases against journalists and online commentators. The OSCE mission's interim report recorded that, in the run-up to the campaign, blogger Adiletkhan Moldakhan was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, journalist Aizhan Mameshova was sentenced to a five-year prohibition on public activity, and proceedings continued against the former editor-in-chief of the outlet Orda.kz — all on charges of disseminating false information. During the campaign itself, a court in Astana ordered the two-month pretrial detention of YouTube blogger Azamat Omarov on incitement charges tied to a satirical broadcast; the editor-in-chief of the news agency KazTag, Amir Kasenov, was sentenced to 15 months' restriction of liberty and a five-year ban on journalistic work, also on false-information charges; and journalist Lukpan Akhmedyarov was briefly detained by Astana police on a related complaint. Separately, representatives of Radio Azattyq, the Kazakh-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said 11 of its journalists were left without accreditation for the campaign after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs postponed a review of their credentials until mid-September.

International Observers Weigh In

An OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights election observation mission, led by Ambassador Vincent Piket, deployed a 12-member core team from nine OSCE participating states, along with 22 long-term observers who arrived beginning July 18, and requested up to 300 short-term observers from OSCE states for election day itself. ODIHR has previously observed 15 elections and two referenda in Kazakhstan, most recently the 2023 parliamentary election and the 2026 constitutional referendum. Separately, Kazakhstan's Central Election Commission said a total of 777 international observers, representing 42 countries and 13 international organizations — including the OSCE, the CIS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and others — were accredited to monitor the election as of the August 17 accreditation deadline, a figure that included 138 sitting members of parliament from 41 countries.

ODIHR, together with observer delegations from the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, was scheduled to present a joint statement of preliminary findings and conclusions at a press conference in Astana on Monday afternoon local time, the day after the vote. A fuller assessment is expected to follow in a final report several months later. In its August 7 interim report, the mission had already flagged several areas of concern ahead of election day: the elimination of independent candidacies, restrictions on the media environment that it said limit freedom of expression despite constitutional guarantees, and the expedited process — with what some of its interlocutors described as limited transparency and public consultation — by which the package of constitutional laws underpinning the new system was adopted.

Why the Vote Matters

The election is the first practical test of Tokayev's constitutional overhaul, and the result suggests the redesigned institutions have, for now, reinforced rather than diluted the concentration of political authority around the presidency, according to independent analysts and the OSCE's own observation mission. A Kurultai in which one party holds such a dominant share of the vote is likely to face little effective legislative counterweight, even though the new constitution formally expands parliament's role by requiring its consent for the president's choice of vice president. Kazakh officials describe the changes as a deliberate, phased transition toward a stronger parliament; the OSCE mission's interim report noted that some of its interlocutors from registered political parties view the new party-centered system positively, while most other interlocutors it consulted criticized the elimination of independent candidacies as a limitation on political participation.

The stakes extend beyond domestic politics. Kazakhstan, a nation of roughly 21 million people with substantial oil and uranium reserves, sits between Russia and China and has taken on a larger role as a transit corridor amid Western sanctions on Moscow. The Kurultai elected Sunday will remain in office through Kazakhstan's next scheduled presidential election in 2029 — a race in which the Constitutional Court's July ruling on term limits has opened the door for Tokayev himself to stand again, even as he has said only that the election will occur on schedule and has not stated whether he intends to run.

What Could Happen Next

One plausible outcome, based on the preliminary results, is that the Kurultai convenes with Adilet holding a dominant majority and functions largely to advance the government's stated legislative priorities, with the four smaller parties exercising limited influence at the margins. A more incremental path would see those smaller parties use their numbers to shape narrower policy debates even without altering the overall balance of power — a dynamic that would depend heavily on rules of procedure, committee structures and leadership arrangements the Kurultai has not yet adopted.

A higher-risk scenario centers on the economic and social pressures that preceded the 2022 unrest. Kazakhstan's public finances remain sensitive to swings in oil revenue, and some analysts have suggested that authorities remain wary of a repeat of that crisis. Continued restrictions on opposition organizing and independent media, combined with any renewed economic strain, could deepen public disengagement from the restructured institutions rather than build the broader legitimacy officials say the reform was designed to produce. Indicators worth tracking include the Central Election Commission's final, certified results and seat allocation, due within seven days; the OSCE-led mission's preliminary findings statement and its fuller report months later; the legal outcomes for journalists and activists prosecuted ahead of the vote; and the substantive agenda the Kurultai adopts once it convenes.

Considerations for Kazakh and International Actors

For Kazakh authorities, a series of recommendations that ODIHR has raised across multiple past election cycles in Kazakhstan — including reintroducing the possibility of independent candidacies, strengthening the independence of election commission appointments, and replacing criminal sanctions for defamation and insult of officials with civil remedies — remain unaddressed and were raised again in this cycle's interim report. Clarifying, on a lasting rather than case-by-case basis, that foreign funding does not disqualify domestic election observers would also directly answer one of the concerns documented by the mission.

For the OSCE and its member states, sustaining the kind of sustained, detailed election-observation engagement that has now covered 16 electoral events in Kazakhstan offers a continuing, evidence-based benchmark, even as findings have often diverged from the assessments Kazakh officials present publicly. For the European Union, the United States and other partners weighing Kazakhstan's strategic importance in Central Asia against rights concerns, engagement that references specific, documented cases — such as those detailed in ODIHR's interim report — is likely to be both more diplomatically sustainable and more directly actionable for Kazakh counterparts than broader, less specific criticism.

Conclusion

Sunday's election closed the first electoral chapter of a constitutional transformation that Kazakh authorities describe as a structural modernization of the state, and that independent observers describe as a further concentration of presidential power delivered through new institutional forms. Both characterizations rest on much of the same underlying record: a redesigned, single-chamber parliament; a dominant ruling party assembled and merged with the former ruling party within the space of about five weeks ahead of the vote; and an electoral process that, by the assessment of the OSCE's own observation mission, still falls short of the pluralism the organization has recommended to Kazakhstan across sixteen prior observed elections and referenda. What the Kurultai does with the mandate it has now received — and whether the government acts on outstanding recommendations from the observers it invited — will help determine whether this reform marks a genuine institutional shift or, as critics contend, a more durable architecture for the status quo.