APRIL 4 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Nursultan Nazarbayev got what he wanted from Kazakhstan’s presidential election on April 3.

The Central Election Committee said he won with 95% of the vote. So, while rulers in the Middle East contend with popular uprisings, Nazarbayev has won a huge mandate to extend his 20 year rule by another five years.

But although support for Nazarbayev is high, the detail shows his victory may not have been as comprehensive as the headline figures suggest.

The main opposition boycotted the vote and said Nazarbayev’s three challengers were put up by the authorities to give the election a veneer of competition and despite an official turnout of 90%, a Conway Bulletin correspondent in Almaty found plenty of people who had not voted.

People also said they had been coerced into voting. In Shymkent, a city in southern Kazakhstan, a construction worker called Nazir said: “They told us that if we didn’t vote we would not be paid. So, we voted.”

International election monitors also said they had recorded incidences of ballot stuffing and intimidation. But in an opinion piece in the Washington Post on March 31, Nazarbayev wrote described Kazakhstan’s economic achievements and appeared to pre-empt criticism of the vote.

“It took the great democracies of the world centuries to develop,” he said. “We are not going to become a fully developed democracy overnight. But we have proved that we can deliver on our big ambitions.”