The country's electoral commission said 95.5 percent of the ballots went to the 70-year-old incumbent, the BBC reports. Turnout stood at nearly 90 percent, the commission said.

Nazarbayev after the election said he would continue his reform process that he said had secured Kazakhstan its stellar rise to riches over the past two decades.

A landlocked country larger than Western Europe, Kazakhstan over the past years regularly averaged double-digit yearly economic growth thanks to its vast oil and natural gas resources.

While Nazarbayev turned the capital Astana from a sleepy steppe town into a shiny 21st-century metropolis with futuristic skyscrapers, he also made sure to stifle any public opposition.

Sunday's election was called early by Nazarbayev after his proposal to cancel the next two elections was ruled unconstitutional. Alexander Rahr, a senior political expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, a Berlin think tank, said the call for an early election was carefully planned.

"Nazarbayev monitors the protest movements in the Arab world very closely and with this election wanted to cement the legitimacy of his rule," Rahr said in a statement released ahead of the vote.

The opposition, already aware of Nazarbayev's popularity, had little time to prepare and failed to come up with a serious contender. One challenger, environmental activist Mels Yeleusizov, even voted for Nazarbayev, he told Russian news agency Interfax.

Given that the election's outcome was clear even before people voted, the high turnout surprised many.

International observers criticized the election. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which had about 400 observers in the country, said local authorities pressured people to vote, for example by threatening to expel students if they didn't show up at the polls. OSCE observers said they noted serious irregularities at the ballot, including many seemingly identical signatures on voter lists and several cases of ballot box stuffing.

"Reforms necessary for holding genuine democratic elections have yet to materialize," the OSCE said in a statement released Monday. The head of the monitoring team, Daan Everts, said the election "could and should have been better."

In an article published by The Washington Post last week, Nazarbayev defended his governing course, saying that a strong economy was at the moment more important that democracy.

"Without such strength, as we have seen repeatedly around the world, stability is put at risk and democratic reform can founder," he argued.

Rahr said Europe should be happy about the stability in Kazakhstan, given that the country could turn into an important resource trading partner.

"Kazakhstan, rich in oil, natural gas and uranium, is the perfect fit to become an alternative energy and resource supplier to Western economies -- especially as the instability in the Arab world endangers supplies, with nobody really knowing if the protests spread to other parts of that region," he said.

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