Kazakhstan elects new President as hundreds arrested in protests

Kazakhstan has elected interim leader Kassym-Jomart Tokayev - the hand-picked successor of long-term former longtime president Nursultan Nazarbayev - as the country's new president, preliminary results suggest.

Nazarbayev, who ruled oil producer Kazakhstan for almost three decades, handpicked the 66-year-old career diplomat as his successor when he stepped down in March. In a power-sharing arrangement, Nazarbayev, 78, remains chairman of the influential Securiy Council and leads the ruling Nur Otan party.

The early results on Monday showed Tokayev, a career diplomat who has been serving as interim president since Nazarbayev resigned in March, taking 70.76 percent of the vote.

A government-approved "Public Opinion" pollster on Sunday showed Tokayev's closest rival Amirzhan Kosanov receiving 15 percent of the vote.

With Tokayev’s six rivals largely unknown to Kazakh voters, opponents denounced the election as unfair, prompting public protests despite Kazakhstan’s restrictive laws on freedom of expression.

During Sunday’s vote, police arrested 500 people at rallies in Almaty and Nur-Sultan, the capital city that was renamed after Nazarbayev at Tokayev’s suggestion.

The protesters were calling for a boycott of the snap election, which they allege was staged to put a politician loyal to Nazarbayev in the country's top seat.

The resignation of the 78-year-old leader who led Kazakhstan since its separation from the Soviet Union in 1991, came as a surprise to many who expected him to run for re-election next year.

The build-up to the vote saw an intensifying crackdown on the opposition with courts sentencing protesters to short stays in jail and police raiding activists' homes.

A number of journalists were also arrested, as was a representative of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee rights NGO. They were all later released.

Four years ago, Nazarbayev scored nearly 98 percent of a virtually uncontested vote where the official turnout was 95 percent.

No Kazakh vote has ever been recognised as fully democratic by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which had sent more than 300 observers to monitor the election.