March 19 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Amanat Party of the Kazakh president, Kasim Jomart Tokayev, has been the most voted in the legislative elections this Sunday, according to three exit polls that give the formation around 50 percent of the votes.
According to the study by the Institute for Eurasian Integration, 53.46 percent of the votes were given to the Amanat Party, followed by the Auyl People’s Democratic Patriotic Party (10.52 percent), the Respublica Party (8.9 percent), the Kazakhstan People’s Party (6.5%), the Aq Jol Democratic Party (7.87%), the National Social Democratic Party (5.31%) and the Baytaq Party (3.22%).
A second study by Sotsis-A/Institute for Sociological Research gives the Amanat Party 54.42 percent of the vote. The other percentages are very similar, as in the study by the Research Association of the Institute for Democracy, all of them collected by the Astana Times portal.
The turnout was 54.19 percent, as reported at a press conference by the vice president of the Central Electoral Commission, Konstantin Petrov. There have been 6,521,860 votes out of a total of 12,035,578 registered citizens.
The Central Electoral Commission plans to publish the official results on Monday and with them the composition of the Mazhilis or Kazakh Parliament, made up of 98 members: 69 elected on party lists and 29 in nominal direct election at the rate of one position per constituency.
Tokayev, the country’s undisputed leader, has promoted for some time now measures that encourage multipartyism, such as reducing the percentage of votes needed to reach Parliament from 7 to 5 percent in the face of elections that will incorporate independent candidates.
In the previous legislature, only three parties were represented and all supported President Tokayev, who was re-elected president in November last year with a landslide victory, collecting more than 80 percent of the vote without any real opposition.
