Kazakh poll gives all seats to Nazarbayev

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev's party won every available seat in a new parliament yesterday after a flawed vote the opposition said turned the clock back to totalitarian Soviet rule.

Foreign poll monitors said the election, which gave an 88.05 per cent margin of victory to Nazarbayev's Nur Otan party, did not meet international standards.

Six other parties in the poll failed to reach a 7 per cent hurdle required to enter the lower house, the Mazhilis, including the main opposition All-National Social Democratic Party (ANSDP) which received 4.62 per cent of the vote.

"Kazakhstan has taken a real step towards democracy," the presenter on state-controlled Khabar Television said after a live broadcast of the preliminary results.But Bolat Abilov, one of the ANSDP's leaders, said: "This is absolutely absurd. We're going back to the Soviet Union, to the Communist Party."

Monitors from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said there was a lack of transparency during the count, state media bias in favour of Nur Otan, and too many legal barriers to foster plurality.REUTERS

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