Archive · 2025 · From the print edition of Saturday 21 June 2025, Vol. 33, No. 10,104
OpinionIradOne's mayor
Erkin Asanbaev has been Mayor of Talas for ten years. He has never been elected, and he is never off our television screens.
Erkin Asanbaev was appointed Mayor of Talas by the Governor in 2015, the year Alikhan Toktarov became chairman of IradOne. The two appointments were unrelated, we were told. Ten years on, it is hard to remember a reception at the Alikhan Media Center where the mayor was not in the front row.
It is the mayor's city government that issues the building permits on Liberty Boulevard, where the Steppe Luxury Group's stores have gone up in the past five years. It is the mayor who cuts the ribbon at IradOne's charity evenings, and IradOne that shows the ribbon being cut. The city's roads, its buses and its bins, which matter rather more to most of its citizens, get rather less airtime.
None of this is illegal. Mayors in the ISEZ are appointed, not elected, and are free to attend receptions. But a mayor who owes nothing to the voters must owe something to someone, and in ten years Mr. Asanbaev has given the people of Talas plenty of reasons to wonder whom he answers to.
So we offer him a test. Let him spend one evening a month, for a year, at a public meeting in a district where IradOne's cameras do not go. Until then, we will go on calling him what he looks like from here: IradOne's mayor.