Change has come to Kazakhstan, at last.
The former Soviet republic’s first president, seventy-nine-year-old Nursultan Nazarbayev, stepped down in March after nearly thirty years in power. His successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, won the post in last month’s elections, racking up 70 percent of the vote.
The election process, albeit imperfect, was Kazakhstan’s most legitimate yet. (In the previous election, for example, Nazarbayev won with a reported 97.7 percent of the vote.) Just as…