Zimbabwe anxiously awaited yesterday the first results from its presidential election as an official count show the opposition slightly ahead of Robert Mugabe's ruling party in the contest for parliament.
With just over half of the results from the 210 constituencies announced, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) had won 56 parliament seats while Mugabe's ZANU-PF trailed slightly with 53.
Despite calls from foreign governments, there was still no official word on the battle for the presidency between 84-year-old Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai as well as long shot candidate Simba Makoni, a former finance minister.
The headline in the state-run Herald, the country's only newspaper, read: "ZANU-PF, MDC in tight contest."
Cashing in on the public demand for information, vendors sold the paper for three times the official cover price.
With the results process moving slowly, foreign governments have urged the state-appointed Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to step up their declarations.
Some voters have expressed skepticism about the parliamentary results that have so far been released, having expected ZANU-PF to be wiped out as a backlash to the economic meltdown which has blighted the country.
Based on its own calculations, the MDC is confident that it has clearly won both the presidential and parliamentary contest.
However, a respected coalition of nongovernmental organizations that deployed some 8,000 local election observers has projected Tsvangirai will fall just short of the votes needed to deliver a knock-out blow to Mugabe.
According to the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, Tsvangirai won 49.4 percent of the votes against Mugabe's 41.8 percent, which would necessitate a second round run-off later this month.
Tsvangirai has made no public appearance since voting day when he accused the authorities of widespread vote-rigging, but he was expected to hold a press conference later yesterday.
There had been fears of the kind of bloodshed that marred the aftermath of recent polls in Kenya.
While the election process has passed off largely without incident, there have been warnings that holding-up the results will only fuel tensions.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged that "the results come forward soon" as the world is watching closely "wanting to be sure that everything is done fairly and ... in the right way."
US State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the US was "concerned by the slow pace of the official tabulation," urging the electoral commission "to release the entire election results, including the presidential election returns, as quickly as possible."
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