Kazakhstan's veteran leader Nursultan Nazarbayev looks set to sweep an early presidential election on Sunday that will propel him into a third decade of uncontested rule in the largest country of former Soviet Central Asia.
Heavy turnout in Sunday's vote broke the 2005 election record, with 84 per cent of Kazakhstan's nine million eligible voters casting their ballots by 18:00, two hours before the polling stations closed. The high voter turnout should demonstrate political stability in Muslim Kazakhstan at a time when the Arab world is in violent turmoil.
Preliminary results are to be announced on Monday and Mr. Nazarbayev, who will turn 71 in July, is expected to garner more than 90 per cent of the vote in a contest against three other candidates, none of who can throw up a challenge to the incumbent President. In fact, one of the contestants said he had voted for Mr. Nazarbayev.
“This was my way of showing respect for the winner,” candidate Mels Eleusizov, an environmentalist, told reporters after emerging from a polling station.
Mr. Nazarbayev's two other sparring partners are Communist leader Zhambyl Akhmetbekov and Party of Patriots leader Gani Kasymov, Kazakhstan's equivalent of Russia's maverick Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Presidential elections in Kazakhstan were due at the end of 2012, but Mr. Nazarbayev called a snap poll after a proposal to extend his term to 2020 in a referendum was approved by the one-party Parliament but rejected by the Constitutional Council. Experts said the referendum idea was a clever manoeuvre by Mr. Nazarbayev to win some democratic credentials in the West for his authoritarian regime.
Mr. Nazarbayev has been in power since 1990, when Kazakhstan was still part of the Soviet Union. The country's Constitution allows only two straight presidential terms, but amendments introduced in 2007 allow “the first President” to stand as many times as he wishes.
Mr. Nazarbayev is credited with charting a highly effective economic course which has ensured 8.5 per cent annual growth and led to a dramatic improvement in people's living standards.
