ASTANA (AFP) - Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev faced an onslaught from critics angered at the conduct of elections expected to renew the first family's grip on this oil-rich former Soviet republic's parliament.
Preliminary results showed that 56 percent of the country's 8.5 million voters had turned out for Sunday's elections to the 77-seat lower house of parliament, or majilis -- a usually compliant institution whose powers Nazarbayev had promised to increase after the election.
Sixty-seven of the seats were to be allotted on a constituency basis and 10 on the basis of party lists.
A first batch of 188,280 votes gathered under a controversial electronic voting system, gave Nazarbayev's Otan (Fatherland) party 42.83 percent of the votes for party list seats, followed by the Asar (All Together) party recently created by his daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva with 19.24 percent.
But while full results remained unknown, criticism of the elections mounted, particularly over the introduction of a barely tested electronic voting system, a lack of transparency and the oppositions lack of access to the media.
"In many respects the elections fell short of OSCE and Council of Europe standards for democratic elections," Ihor Ostash, coordinator of the OSCE short-term observation mission, told journalists.
Reformist Information Minister Altynbek Sarsenbayuly, who had been a sole opposition face in government representing the Ak Zhol (Bright Path) party, resigned in protest.
"The authorities showed that from the beginning they didn't want honest elections," Sarsenbayuly said in a written statement.
Condemnation also came from the more outspoken Democratic Choice party, whose leader Galymzhan Zhakiyanov is imprisoned on corruption charges widely seen as politically motivated.
"After this election the country will become more corrupt and two-faced," Asylbek Kozhakhmetov, Democratic Choice's chairman, said.
"We hoped these elections would be fair but ... the authorities have become even more skillful in falsification," he told AFP.
Zagipa Baliyeva, head of the central election commission, rejected the criticism of the vote.
"Our elections went excellently," she said. "They were honest and objective. Each party had equal access but they're very different and have different prospects" for gaining parliamentary representation.
The 64-year-old Nazarbayev was Kazakshtan's last Soviet-era president and has clung on through a series of referendums and elections criticised by the West as flawed.
He has said he will stand again at presidential elections in 2006, while much speculation has turned on whether his daughter sees herself as an eventual presidential contender.
As he cast his ballot on Sunday, Nazarbayev insisted that fears of irregularities in the vote were unfounded. "These elections are taking place in an open and transparent way," he said.
The president's daughter, a 41-year-old opera singer who oversees a clutch of television and radio stations, has used Asar to try to address public discontent, which has been fanned by allegations of graft within the first family and revelations of its lavish lifestyle.
She has sharply criticised alleged corruption in Otan, while speaking in glowing terms of Nazarbayev's role as Kazakhstan's founding father and saying she will support him in the presidential elections.
Diplomats said that settling the succession issue is a crucial test of the long-term stability of this country whose major Caspian Shelf oil reserves are prized by the West.
While Asar will maintain its critical stance the new parliament is unlikely to receive meaningful new powers, Dosym Satpayev, director of the Almaty-based Assessment Risks Group, said.
Nazarbayev "has put a lot of administrative resources into parliament remaining pro-presidential (and) isnt interested in it competing with him," Satpayev said.
The OSCE observer mission noted some improvements in the latest elections, saying that no media had been closed down and that electoral legislation had been improved, although in many cases it was poorly applied.