News Desk
ASTANA: Kazakhstan’s incumbent President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev is leading Sunday’s early presidential elections with over 80 per cent of the vote, according to various exit polls.
According to an exit poll conducted by the Open Society International Institute for Regional Studies, Tokayev – who is competing against five other candidates in the country’s seventh presidential polls – received 82.45% of the votes.
Meanwhile, according to an exit poll conducted by the Amanat party’s Institute of Public Policy at 600 polling stations, 85.52% of voters voted for Tokayev.
As per another exit poll conducted by the Institute for Comprehensive Social Research at 379 polling stations across the country, Tokayev was far ahead of the other five candidates with 82.02% of the vote.
‘Historic Polls’
Tokayev visited the election center in the capital, Astana, after the results of the exit polls. He met his voters and called the elections “historic.” The voting ended at 10 pm Astana time.
According to Kazakh Central Election Committee, as of 10 pm, the turnout was over 69%, with nearly 8.3 million of around 12 million eligible voters casting ballots.
The Early Elections
Tokayev called for early elections in late September with a decree saying the polls would launch “an electoral cycle that will lead to a radical reset of the entire political system.”
The polls were announced a day after Tokayev approved a constitutional amendment to increase the presidential term from five to seven years while barring future presidents from serving a second term.
Another move was to change the capital’s name back to Astana after it was named Nur-Sultan in 2019 in a tribute to the outgoing President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Tokayev assumed office as president in March 2019, succeeding Nazarbayev, who ruled the oil-rich Central Asian nation for around thirty years. – APP/AFP
