Kassym-Jomart Tokayev
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has been president of Kazakhstan since March 2019, when Nazarbayev, after twenty-nine years, resigned in his favour and kept the security council, the party and the title of leader of the nation, and the capital was renamed Nur-Sultan the next day. The career diplomat whom everyone took for a placeholder kept his place through the January 2022 uprising, when a fuel-price protest in the west became riots that burned the mayor's office in Almaty and killed two hundred and thirty-eight. He called in Russian-led troops under the collective security treaty, gave the order to shoot without warning. Then, with the crisis as cover, he removed Nazarbayev from the security council, jailed his nephew and his intelligence chief, took the family's businesses back for the state, and changed the capital's name back to Astana. He had a referendum in June 2022 strip the first president's privileges from the constitution. He was born in Almaty in 1953, the son of a writer, studied at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, served the Soviet foreign ministry in Singapore and Peking, where he learned Chinese. He was Kazakhstan's foreign minister from 1994 to 1999 and 2002 to 2007, and prime minister from 1999 to 2002. He was director-general of the United Nations office at Geneva from 2011 to 2013 before returning to chair the senate, which is the office the constitution makes the successor's. The election of November 2022, called early under a new rule of a single seven-year term, gave him eighty-one per cent. The reforms of the new Kazakhstan he promised, a stronger parliament, elected district governors and a constitutional court, have been partial. The men jailed after January were not the men who shot. The foreign policy is the multi-vector one Nazarbayev made, Russia's ally in the treaty and China's in the belt and road, with the oil going west through Russia's pipeline and Kazakhstan refusing to recognise the annexations in Ukraine to Putin's face at St Petersburg in June 2022. He has said he will not seek another term when this one ends in 2029.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Kazakh
- Roles: president, diplomat, politician
