Politics & Power Quote by Kassym-Jomart Tokayev

“Forward-thinking” is doing a lot of diplomatic lifting here. Tokayev’s line is less a feel-good plea than a governing strategy: keep the public’s gaze trained on the horizon so they don’t stare too hard at the cracks underfoot. As a sitting president, he’s using the rhetoric of modernity to confer legitimacy on the present. If the nation is “looking ahead”, then criticism can be framed as nostalgia, obstruction, or even sabotage.

The pivot from “divides” to “unites” sounds consensual, but it quietly narrows the acceptable range of political speech. Unity language is often a velvet rope: you’re invited in as long as your grievances don’t disrupt the mood. In post-Soviet political cultures, that subtext can carry real force, because “division” is easily equated with instability, and instability with existential threat. The sentence invites citizens to trade the messy work of pluralism for the cleaner optics of cohesion.

Context matters: Tokayev governs Kazakhstan, a country balancing multiethnic identity, resource-driven inequality, and geopolitical pressure from Russia and China, while courting investment and international credibility. “Forward-thinking” plays well externally (reform, predictability, a modern state) and internally (a promise of gradual improvement without upheaval). After moments of unrest and demands for accountability, unity talk becomes an instrument: not just to heal, but to manage. The genius of the phrasing is its ambiguity - it can mean reconciliation, reform, or restraint, depending on who’s listening and what they’re prepared to accept.