Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has won re-election in a landslide, according to official results released on Friday, but the opposition vowed to appeal saying the election was marred by fraud.
Bouteflika, who said he needed a second mandate until 2009 to firmly steer the Muslim country toward democracy and a market economy after a brutal Islamic holy war, received 83.5 percent of the votes cast, Interior Minister Noureddine Zerhouni said.
His main challenger, former Prime Minister Ali Benflis, obtained just under eight percent. The other four candidates trailed even further. The winner needed more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a run-off on April 22.
Turnout was 57.8 percent, which Zerhouni called "exceptional" compared with 46 percent in parliamentary elections in 2002.
Thursday's presidential election was seen as pivotal for the future of the energy-rich North African country after years of military-backed or one-party rule since independence from France in 1962.
Bouteflika, a 67-year-old veteran politician with a moderate stance but an authoritarian streak, became the first re-elected president since the end of the one-party state in 1989.
"For our country it is unprecedented that we'll have a stable executive elected by a wide consensus. It should get Algeria out of its crisis for good," Abdeslam Bouchoureb, a top Bouteflika campaign official, told reporters.
But opponents cried foul even before results were announced. The office of Benflis said he would launch legal appeals.
"We've had multiple reports of fraud, ballot boxes were swapped," said Soufiane Djilali, a top Benflis campaign aide. He declined to elaborate and said details of the complaints would be presented to the watchdog Constitutional Council.
The election was being watched in the West and the US, which sees Algeria, because of its recent past and geopolitical situation, as crucial in its global war on terror.
Succeeding a list of former generals as heads of state, Bouteflika has given Algeria a civilian face abroad. He has been received at the White House and restored a measure of confidence in the country, accompanied by a return of foreign investment.
Western diplomats expected the poll in the vast country of 32 million to underline its return to the international fold under Bouteflika, who has all but ended a bloody guerrilla war, much of it directed against civilians.
It flared after the military prevented a hardline Islamic party from gaining power at the ballot box 12 years ago. Many Algerians give Bouteflika credit for an emergence from this decade of violence in which the government says at least 100,000 people were killed. Human rights groups put the toll at 150,000.
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