The veteran president, who has led Kazakhstan since the Soviet era and stands to win another seven-year term, garnered 84.55 percent of the vote, according to the Eurasian Rating Agency, a private think tank.

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

Nazarbayev was due at a rally of supporters in Astana early Monday.

But expectations of a crushing victory by Nazarbayev, whose 16-year rule has transformed this former Soviet backwater into an emerging world oil power, were 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 the exit poll won just 9.58 percent.

"We intend to use all potential, possible legal mechanisms to protest these violations," Sarimov told reporters in the state'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.

Victory for Nazarbayev, 65, 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 Kazakhstan, roughly the size of western Europe or India and 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."

In an apparent sign of his confidence, he announced a rally of supporters at an Astana sports hall Monday and a meeting with reporters just before the expected announcement of official results.

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.

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