A supporter of Egypt's presidential candidate Abdel Fattah al-Sisi holds an Egyptian national flag with a pasted portrait of Sisi near a polling station in Alexandria, costal city of Egypt, on May 28, 2014. Egypt's three-day voting has come to an end at 9 p.m. local time (1800GMT) on Wednesday for the first presidential election following the ouster of former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. (Xinhua/Asmaa Abdelatif)
CAIRO, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Initial poll count on Wednesday showed that Egypt's former military chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi would get a landslide victory in the just-ended presidential election.
Sisi won about 95 percent of the ballots collected from nearly half of the polling stations, his campaign team was quoted by the official Nile Television as saying.
Sisi had already received more than 10.5 million votes, while his sole rival, leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahy received about 350,000, the report said.
Sisi's popularity has surged since the military toppled former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi last July in what pro-Morsi supporters claimed to be "a military coup".
Harsh security crackdown has left hundreds of protesters dead and thousands of others arrested. Morsi himself is also in prison and faces several charges, including murder and spying.
Judge Tarek Shebl, member of the general secretariat of the Presidential Election Commission, the highest judicial body of the race, told reporters that an estimated 25 million out of the total 53.8 million eligible voters cast their ballots. Nationwide voter turnout was around 46 percent, lower than the nearly 52 percent of the mid-2012 presidential race won by Morsi.
The final result would be released on Sunday or Monday, he added.
Sisi, 59, was expected to trounce Sabahy in the three-day presidential election that wrapped up on Wednesday night. The count process started nationwide soon after all the 14,000 polling stations were closed.
Voting was previously scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, but the election commission announced on Tuesday afternoon to extend the poll for one day. The sudden move has drawn criticisms and raised questions over the "justice" of the election.
The commission said the decision was to "give a chance to the largest number of people to participate in the polls." Critics, however, said it was for Sisi to get a decisive show of support as he needed a strong turnout to prove he enjoyed popular backing across Egypt.
Sisi's supporters have begun celebrating in Cairo, with hundreds of them gathering at the central Tahrir square, a symbolic place of "democracy" for the Egyptian people.
CAIRO, May 5 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's ex-military chief and presidential candidate Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi said Monday that the military will not rule Egypt if he wins in the upcoming presidential elections.
"The army will not play a role in ruling Egypt if I become the president," Sisi said in an interview aired by two Egyptian private TV channels on Monday night, noting that the army "did not rule Egypt over the past 30 years." Full Story
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