Incumbent Kazakh president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, was sworn in for a second term in office on Saturday (November 26), Reuters reports.
Tokayev's inauguration came after a snap election on November 20 which saw him garner 81.31% of the vote, according to Kazakstan's electoral commission.
He had been widely expected to extend his rule over the oil-rich nation by seven more years, with a strong mandate to continue his increasingly independent foreign policy, as the former Soviet republic navigates the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
Tokayev's first major international meeting after his re-election is set for November 28 with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Russian city of Orenburg.
The former diplomat told Putin at a meeting during the summer that Kazakhstan would not recognise the pro-Russian separatist statelets in eastern Ukraine that Moscow later claimed to have annexed.
Voter turnout in Kazakhstan's snap election was 69.44%, with five other candidates scoring in the low single digits, data showed. Voters' second most popular choice was "against everyone", with 5.8% of ballots.
Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said the vote underlined the need for further legal reforms to ensure genuine pluralism.
Kazakhstan's foreign ministry said the statement by the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights "lacks objectivity and puts in question the effectiveness of the ODIHR as an important institution".
The European Union said it would continue to work with Kazakhstan under their Enhanced Partnership and Cooperation Agreement and back a roll-out of important reforms to enable "a fully transparent and competitive political environment as key steps towards a new democratic and fair Kazakhstan".
Tokayev won his first election in 2019 with the backing of predecessor Nursultan Nazarbayev, but the two fell out this year amid violent unrest in the nation of 20 million.
