ASTANA, Kazakhstan, 20 August 2007 — The party of President Nursultan Nazarbayev has won all available seats in Kazakhstan’s new Parliament, according to preliminary results announced yesterday that were quickly condemned by the opposition.

An observer mission from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said that although a number of international standards were not met, the elections showed welcome progress toward democracy.

Nazarbayev, who has ruled Kazakhstan since 1989 when it was still a Soviet republic, had pledged that the elections would be free and fair. He is pushing for Kazakhstan to become chairman in 2009 of the OSCE, which has delayed making a decision because of concerns about the country’s commitment to democracy.

The Nur Otan party received 88 percent of Saturday’s vote and no other party cleared the 7 percent barrier needed to win a seat in the legislature, according to results released by the Central Elections Commission.

The country’s two largest opposition groups said the figures were manipulated.

“We don’t recognize the outcome of the election. They absolutely do not reflect the actual alignment of political forces and the social support they draw,” Burikhan Nurmukhamedov, a leader of the Ak Zhol party, was quoted as saying by the news agency Interfax.

The elections commission said Ak Zhol had received about 3.25 percent of the vote, but Nurmukhamedov said the party’s own surveys indicated it won about 12 percent.

“We have definitely won those votes,” he said, adding that the party was preparing reports on voting irregularities to be presented to the elections commission and the prosecutor-general, Interfax said.

“The elections have been utterly profaned,” said Ualikhan Kaisarov of the National Social Democratic Party, which received 4.62 percent in the official tally, according to Interfax.

The election had been expected to slightly improve the position of the opposition, which held only one seat in the outgoing Parliament.

The OSCE, which fielded more than 400 observers, said the vote count was assessed negatively in over 40 percent 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.

All previous elections in post-Soviet Kazakhstan had been assessed by the OSCE as being less than free and fair.

An observer mission from the Commonwealth of Independent States, a group formed by Russia and other former Soviet republics, gave a positive assessment of the elections, calling them “free and transparent,” the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, quoting CIS Secretary Vladimir Rushailo.

The CIS observers consider the elections “a reflection of the stable social and economic development of Kazakhstan,” said Rushailo, a former Russian interior minister.

Nazarbayev has brought relative prosperity to the nation of 15 million, where economic growth has been in the double digits in recent years.

The country’s stability is important to regional powers Russia and China because of its substantial oil and gas reserves. The United States also has sought greater access to Kazakh energy resources.

The Saturday vote was to choose 98 members of the lower house of Parliament. Nine more seats will be filled by members of the Assembly of Peoples, a powerless body designed to give a voice to ethnic minorities.

Voter turnout was just under 65 percent nationwide, the elections commission said. In the 2004 parliamentary election it was 56.8 percent.

The early election, called in the wake of constitutional amendments pushed through by Nazarbayev in May, was widely seen as a maneuver by him to improve Kazakhstan’s democratic image while maintaining his own grip on power.