"Since the Cold War’s end, most dictatorial governments have
collapsed after their ruler’s departure.
Kazakhstan’s explosion into unrest this week presents a
stark warning to the strongman autocrats of the world: Leaving office is
perilous.
Since the Cold War’s end, a staggering 70 percent of
governments headed by strongmen collapsed after the ruler departed, according
to one data set.
The trend holds whether the leader leaves voluntarily or
involuntarily, dies in office or retires to a country home.
Sometimes, as in Spain after Francisco Franco’s death in
1975, it opens the way to democratization. More often, as in Egypt, Sudan,
Zimbabwe and many others, the result is a cycle of coups, civil conflict or
other violence.
Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s lifelong leader until he
began gradually handing power to a successor in 2019, was, by all appearances,
keenly aware of this problem.
He told an interviewer in 2014 that any country like his
needed “a sustainable system put in place that would be stable against the
backdrop of a new leader’s arrival,” ticking through Malaysia or Singapore as
possible models.
Mr. Nazarbayev stage-managed his own departure in ways that
suggest painstaking attention to the lessons of history, and his transition was
watched closely in Moscow and other capitals as a potential model.
His departure does not appear to have specifically set off
Kazakhstan’s protests. But the unrest, the government’s failure to maintain
support and now its flailing response are typical of the divided, disoriented
bureaucracies that often falter after a strongman’s departure.
The lesson, experts stress, is hardly that strongmen bring
stability. Quite the opposite: Their style of rule erodes the foundations of
governance, making themselves indispensable at the cost of leaving behind a
political system barely capable of governing but primed for infighting.
The Strongman’s Dilemma
Autocrats like Mr. Nazarbayev who stand alone at the top, as
opposed to those who rule on behalf of a larger party apparatus as in Cuba or
Vietnam, face a tricky challenge.
They must strike a balance between all of their country’s
internal factions, ruling elites, security services and military brass,
guaranteeing each enough power and spoils to keep them bought in, but without
letting any grow powerful enough to challenge them.
As a result, strongmen-led dictatorships tend to be more
repressive and more corrupt. And their leaders frequently obsess over potential
rivals, whether a regional leader who grows too popular or a security agency
with too much autonomy.
In his 29 years of rule, Mr. Nazarbayev was, like many such
leaders, notorious for shuffling his government, promoting and demoting
deputies to keep them off balance.
But stifling rising stars, hollowing out power centers and
stuffing institutions with loyalists (often chosen because they are too weak to
pose a threat) leaves the government barely able to stand on its own.
And it creates what some scholars call the strongman’s
dilemma: how to set up a successor without creating a rival, and how to leave a
government able to outlast the leader without making themselves redundant and
vulnerable.
Some try to solve this by grooming family members. Two of
the rare successes followed this model: Azerbaijan and Syria, where dying
autocrats passed power to their sons.
Still, children often prove unable to win the necessary
support, inviting challengers to try to take power themselves.
North Korea is the only modern non-monarchy to have reached
a third generation of family autocratic rule.
Appointing flunkies or other easily controlled subordinates
creates a similar problem.
But staying in office indefinitely is little better. As the
leader’s health inevitably falters, rivals or even allies may be tempted to
grab for power before someone else can take it first. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe
was 93 and visibly declining when he was deposed in a coup.
This is why despots tend to hide from public view when they
have health problems, to avoid any appearance of frailty that might set off a
race to replace them. It’s also why the disappearance of a dictator, even a
reviled one, tends to produce panicked rumors as citizens fear the consequences
of a power vacuum.
When strongman rule works, the leader is the keystone
holding it all together. But any keystone is also the point of greatest
weakness. If it falls away, the whole thing collapses. Which is precisely what
often happens.
“The moment of transfer has almost always been a moment of
crisis,” the scholar Andrew Nathan has written, “involving purges or arrests,
factionalism, sometimes violence, and opening the door to the chaotic intrusion
into the political process of the masses or the military.”
Kazakhstan’s Lesson
This dilemma has especially hung over the former Soviet
world, where autocrats have held on two or three times the average strongman’s
tenure, which is about a decade.
But longer rule means a longer fall, for the leader and
their country, once they inevitably depart.
This has heightened the stakes, with many post-Soviet
leaders extending term limits. With every passing year, it becomes harder for autocrats
to hand off power, while the risks rise of disaster if a crisis should force
them out.
“The odds of regime survival are very dim if the leader’s
departure was forced,” said Erica Frantz, a Michigan State University scholar
of authoritarianism.
This is much more than a problem for strongmen. Such leaders
are increasingly common worldwide, a point of convergence for both calcifying
dictatorships and backsliding democracies. At least two sit in the heart of
Europe. Some experts consider China, where Xi Jinping is building a cult of
personality and has paved the way for lifelong rule, to now qualify.
And the more of the world comes under this style of rule,
the more millions of people are exposed to the dangers of a catastrophically
failed succession.
Mr. Nazarbayev had seemingly addressed this problem by
stepping halfway out of power as a loyalist nominally took over. In theory, he
was to be just present enough to keep the system together, but absent enough to
allow it to coalesce around a new order.
But even in such rare cases where it looks like a transition
has worked, Dr. Frantz said she has found in her research, the new government
tends to collapse within an average of about five years.
“Their successors often face serious challenges in
governance,” she said, citing Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro has
faced ever-mounting crises since taking over from Hugo Chávez in 2013.
Kazakhstan now looks like an example of this, too. It casts
doubt on Mr. Nazarbayev’s supposed solution and suggests that the problem of
strongman succession may be, on some level, irresolvable.
It is why, just as Mr. Nazarbayev’s exit in 2019 is thought
to have been closely watched in palace drawing rooms, it
is a safe bet that the turmoil he failed to forestall will be as well."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/world/asia/kazakhstan-protests-strongmen.html
