Ruling Party Sweeps Kazakhstan Election, Official Count Shows

MOSCOW, Aug. 19 -- The ruling party of Kazakhstan won all of the contested seats in a nationwide parliamentary election this weekend, according to preliminary results announced Sunday. The outcome cements the authority of the country's longtime leader, President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Nazarbayev's party, Nur Otan, received 88 percent of the vote, according to the official early tally. No other party cleared the 7 percent threshold that would have allowed it to win representation in parliament.

As opposition parties dismissed the results as invalid, monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the vote failed to meet a number of international standards of fairness but nonetheless represented a step forward for the democratic development in the oil-rich Central Asian country.

The monitors' statement appeared to give Nazarbayev a boost in his campaign for Kazakhstan to chair the OSCE, a 56-country regional security organization, in 2009.

Opponents of Nazarbayev, who has ruled the country since 1989, argued that the ruling party's alleged winning of nearly nine out of every 10 votes demonstrated the lack of real democracy in Kazakh politics.

"We do not recognize the preliminary results," Alikhan Baymenov, leader of the Ak Zhol opposition party, said by telephone from Kazakhstan. "Our regional representatives report that they have never seen such a level of overt falsification."

Official results showed his party coming in third, with just over 3 percent of the vote; the party's leaders said its own figures showed it winning about 12 percent.

The OSCE criticized Kazakhstan for failing to ensure sufficient openness during the vote count and for limiting pluralism by setting a high threshold for parties to enter parliament.

The organization said its monitors found flaws in the vote count in more than 40 percent of the polling stations they visited, including improper counting procedures. In some cases, votes counted for Nur Otan had been cast for a different party.

Despite the Kazakh authorities' tight control over most mass media, the OSCE report noted "an increased ability of political parties to convey their message to voters."

"Notwithstanding the concerns contained in the report, I believe that these elections continue to move Kazakhstan forward in its evolution towards a democratic country," Consiglio Di Nino, the Canadian senator who led the OSCE's monitoring team, said in a statement.

Sergei Panarin, an analyst at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, said in a telephone interview that the election provided a democratic veneer for the absence of a significant opposition movement in Kazakh politics.

In some former Soviet republics, notably Georgia and Ukraine, disputed election results have catalyzed popular opposition movements that brought to office leaders who have more pro-Western outlooks. Panarin said he did not expect such change to happen in Kazakhstan while the country remains flush with petrodollars. "In the current setting, the opposition simply has nothing to work with," he said.