The veteran president, who has led Kazakhstan since the Soviet era and stands to win another seven-year term, secured 78 to 85 percent of the votes, crushing his four opponents, according to three private exit polls.

"The initial results do show that we have won, although we are waiting for official figures," a spokeswoman at Nazarbayev's campaign headquarters in the capital Astana told AFP.

Nazarbayev, 65, was due to hold a rally with supporters in Astana early Monday.

But the apparently overwhelming victory by Nazarbayev, whose 16-year rule has transformed this former Soviet backwater into an emerging world oil power, was marred by opposition claims of cheating.

"There were multiple violations of the law," said Aidos Sarimov, a spokesman for the runner-up, Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, who according to exit polls won no more than 13 percent.

"We intend to use all potential, possible legal mechanisms to protest these violations," Sarimov told reporters in the republic's biggest city Almaty.

According to Sarimov, voter lists were falsified and the official turnout of 75.5 percent was inflated.

There was "a big difference between the official turnout and that reported by our observers," he said, claiming the real figure was between 55-68 percent.

Communist candidate Yerasyl Abilkasymov, who won under three percent, according to the exit polls, was furious. "Who can believe that Nazarbayev got 85 percent and the four other idiots only 15 percent? No one will accept it."

A Nazarbayev victory had long been predicted, though not always by such a wide margin. Independent analysts say the one-time steel worker, who rose through Communist Party ranks to head Soviet Kazakhstan in 1989, enjoys a solid support base.

Under his rule, Kazakhstan has become the most prosperous and stable part of Central Asia, largely thanks to billions of dollars of foreign investment in the country's Caspian Sea oil fields. Kazakhstan is set to become a top-10 world oil producer within a decade.

But the republic, which is roughly the size of western Europe or India and was once part of Genghis Khan's empire, has never held an election judged free and fair by Western observers.

Even before the election, the opposition complained that media bias and pressure from the authorities had made a fair campaign impossible.

Nazarbayev, who went in sub-zero temperatures to vote at a theatre in Astana, said: "These elections will be more democratic than ever before."

Tuyakbai, 58, has warned that Kazakhstan faces dictatorship under Nazarbayev.

However, opposition officials said they would not break a law banning demonstrations in the immediate aftermath of the election.

About 1,600 observers monitored the election, including some 465 from the influential Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was due to issue its report on the conduct of voting later Monday.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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