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Kazakhstan plans to introduce direct elections for town, village mayors

14 December 2012 18:40 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Kazakh President Nultan Nazarbayev said Friday that he plans to introduce direct elections for town and village mayors starting next year, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

Nazarbayev said more than 2,500 local and regional posts, such as village and town mayors, would be elected. That means more than 90 percent of mayors at all levels will be elected, he said.

This is one of a raft of reforms announced by Nazarbayev in his annual state of the nation address, which focused on cataloging the country's achievements during Nazarbayev's tenure.

Nazarbayev said Kazakhstan has attracted 160 billion U.S. dollars in foreign investment, much of which has gone to developing the oil-rich country's energy and mineral resources.

However, the president said his country would not rush into reforms before the economic conditions were right, adding every step of political reform is closely tied to the level of economic development.

Kazakhstan would seek to pursue further democratization and strengthen the power of the parliament, the president added.

Meanwhile, Nazarbayev said the Latin alphabet would be adopted for the Kazakh language by 2025 to replace the Russian-style Cyrillic alphabet. He argued that such a switch would enable Kazakh children to better understand English and Internet.

By then, 95 percent of Kazakhstan's citizens should have learned to speak Kazakh, the president said. Although Kazakh is the official state language, many people speak Russian instead.

The Kazakh language is a Turkic one and uses some additional letters that are not found in the Cyrillic alphabet.