ASTANA, Kazakhstan: President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s party won all available seats in Kazakhstan’s new parliament in an election that international observers said on Sunday was flawed but still showed the oil-rich country was making progress toward becoming a democracy.
The Nur Otan party received 88 per cent of Saturday’s vote, and no other party cleared the 7 per cent barrier needed to win a seat in the legislature, according to preliminary results released on Sunday by the Central Elections Commission.
The two largest opposition groups condemned the results, saying the figures had been manipulated. Nazarbayev - who has ruled the Central Asian country since 1989, when it was still a Soviet republic - had pledged that the elections would be free and fair. He is pushing for Kazakhstan in 2009 to become chairman of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has delayed making a decision because of concerns about the country’s commitment to democracy.
The OSCE, which had sent more than 400 election observers, said the vote count was assessed negatively in more than 40 per cent of the polling stations visited, mainly due to procedural problems and lack of transparency.
“Notwithstanding the concerns contained in the report, I believe that these elections continue to move Kazakhstan forward in its evolution toward a democratic country,’’ Consiglio Di Nino, a Canadian senator who heads the OSCE observer mission, said in a statement.
