TUNIS
Initial indications of Tunisia's presidential runoff election show that Beji Caid Essebsi, the head of the Nidaa Tounes movement, had won Sunday's runoff poll, Essebsi's campaign team said.
"Indications show that Essebsi had won the vote," the candidate's campaign manager Mohsen Marzouk told reporters in Tunis, shortly after vote-counting had kicked off in around 10,000 polling stations across Tunisia.
Essebsi, for his part, told state TV that he waited for final election results, calling on his rival, incumbent Interim President Moncef Marzouki, to cooperate with him, saying the future made it necessary for both of them to work together.
Marzouki's campaign referred, however, to what it described as a "growing" number of irregularities during the last three hours of the runoff vote, which came to an end at 6:00pm.
An hour and half before polls were scheduled to close, nearly 47 percent of registered voters had cast their ballots, electoral commission member Nabil Bafoun told The Anadolu Agency.
Polling stations had opened their doors at 8:00am.
Some election observers, meanwhile, said voter turnout was moderate in general, citing a noticeably low turnout among youths.
Nearly 5.3 million Tunisians were eligible to cast ballot in the runoff, the final round of the country's first democratic presidential vote.
The first round of the presidential elections – in which 27 candidates competed – saw Essebsi winning some 1.9 million votes (39.4 percent) and Marzouki roughly 1.1 million votes (33.4 percent).
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