MOSCOW —Election official in Kazakhstan announced on Monday thatvoters had re-elected an incumbent who has governed the country since the Soviet Union collapsed, in an election that only ever had one likely winner.
Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, 74, won his fifth
successive term in a snap presidential election in which voters headed to the polls in droves on Sunday. In a televised news conference, election officials said on Monday that Mr. Nazarbayev had taken a whopping 97.7 percent of the vote.
The Central Election Commission of Kazakhstan said that turnout was higher than 95 percent, meaning that nearly 93 of every 100 voting-age Kazakh citizens had headed to the polls and cast a ballot for Mr. Nazarbayev.
Mr. Nazarbayev’s two opponents, who support the current government and were seen as playing a perfunctory role in the elections, won a combined 2.3 percent.
Mr. Nazarbayev took a victory lap on Monday morning and dared the West to criticize his victory.
“I apologize if these numbers are unacceptable for the superdemocratic countries, but there was nothing I could do,” Mr. Nazarbayev said at a televised news conference in Astana, the capital. “If I had interfered, it would have been undemocratic.”
The chairman of the elections commission called the vote a landmark “expression of civil society, electoral activeness and political responsibility.”
The election, which was called in February, was seen as a move by Mr. Nazarbayev to win a vote of confidence as Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s largest country, faces both a daunting economic slowdown driven by the collapse in oil prices and regional instability because of the crisis in Ukraine.