Kazakh leader calls early vote, rejects referendum

ASTANA (Reuters) - Kazakhstan's veteran leader called an early presidential election on Monday after refusing to sanction a referendum that might have let him govern Central Asia's largest economy unopposed for a third decade.

"I cannot create a precedent which would set the wrong guidelines for further generations of politicians," the 70-year-old President Nursultan Nazarbayev said in a live televised address. "I have taken the decision not to hold a referendum," he said. "I propose holding an early presidential election, despite the fact that this will reduce my current term in office by almost two years."

The next election, very likely to be won by Nazarbayev, was scheduled by December 2012.

Earlier on Monday the Constitutional Council ruled a draft parliamentary law -- calling for a referendum that would have bypassed elections in 2012 and 2017 -- was not legal, giving Nazarbayev, who has sweeping powers, one month to oppose the decision.

Nazarbayev, a former steelworker known as "Papa" to many Kazakhs, was a member of the Soviet Communist Party Politburo and has ruled Kazakhstan since before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

SUCCESSION UNCERTAINTY

Many foreign investors, who have poured more than $150 billion into Kazakhstan during Nazarbayev's two decades in power, rate the absence of a clear succession plan as the single biggest threat to political stability in the ex-Soviet state.

Public criticism of the president is taboo and there are no opposition members of parliament. More than half of Kazakhstan's registered voters signed a petition calling for the referendum.

Nazarbayev said the decision on whether to hold a referendum or elections was "divisive" for his vast steppe nation of 16.4 million people, which is the world's largest uranium miner and a major exporter of oil and industrial metals.

He called the legal collision that had been created "a historic lesson of democracy given by life."

The council's decision overruled a unanimous vote by members of parliament in favor of the plebiscite on January 14. Nazarbayev himself had publicly rejected the proposal a week earlier.

The United States and the European Union had also criticized the idea, with Washington calling it a "setback for democracy."

Kazakhstan has never held an election judged free and fair by international observers. Last year, it became the first former Soviet country to chair Europe's main democracy watchdog, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Nazarbayev can stand for election an unlimited number of times. His current seven-year term expires in 2012, after which the presidential term will be cut to five years.

The president said on Friday he plans to rule for as long as his health will allow, saying this was the signal he had received from his people.

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov and Maria Gordeyeva; Writing by Robin Paxton; Editing by Matthew Jones)