Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev extended his quarter-century rule over the oil-rich, ex-Soviet republic with a crushing 97.7 percent of ballots in an election where opposition parties did not field a candidate, officials said yesterday.
Nazarbayev, who has run the huge Central Asian nation since before the Soviet breakup in 1991, is due to start a fifth term. The Central Election Commission (CEC) claimed a record turnout of 95.22 percent in Sunday’s polls.
Speaking in the capital, Astana, shortly after exit polls pointed to nearly total voter support, Nazarbayev said he had a mandate for his plans to make Kazakhstan one of the 30 most-developed nations in the world.
Photo: EPA
“Without this level of general trust it would be difficult to work on realizing such aims. The record-high turnout at the vote demonstrated the unity of Kazakhstan’s people, their desire to live in a stable state and their support for the program I put forward before them,” he said.
However, Nazarbayev tolerates little dissent and has clamped down tightly on media and civic freedoms.
The nation’s deeply marginalized opposition did not have a candidate in the election. The only two other contenders, figures widely seen as pro-government, scored less than 3 percent between them.
The nation, bordering both Russia and China, has never held an election deemed free and fair by international monitors.
Western monitors yesterday slammed the lack of choice.
“Voters were not offered a genuine choice between political alternatives,” said Cornelia Jonker, head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring mission at a briefing in Astana
“There were significant restrictions to the freedom of expression, as well as to the media environment,” she said, adding that the two candidates Nazarbayev faced praised him in their campaigns.
The OSCE sent nearly 300 observers to the vote.
Nazarbayev’s victory was celebrated in cities across the nation with fireworks and flash mobs, while some babies born in hospitals on Sunday and yesterday were given election-themed names.
Many citizens standing in long, snaking lines at polling stations in Astana and in the largest city, Almaty, on Sunday had cited a civic duty to vote, although others complained of having been pressured to go to polling stations by employers — a common practice across parts of the ex-Soviet Union.
“Elections in Kazakhstan resemble political theater,” said Dosym Saptaev, director of the Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group, a think tank based in Almaty. “What matters more is what will happen next. Will we see genuine political reforms to create the basis for political life without Nazarbayev? How will the government fix the economy?”
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a message congratulating Nazarbayev shortly after the election committee confirmed his victory.
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