Fiji strongman wins election

Official results Monday from a landmark Fiji election confirm a big win for the nation's military ruler.

Voreqe Bainimarama and his Fiji First party won an outright majority in the Parliament by taking 32 of 50 seats, according to results released by the Fijian Elections Office.

Last Wednesday's election marked the first time people in the South Pacific nation of 300 islands with a population of about 900,000 have gone to the polls since Bainimarama assumed control in a bloodless 2006 coup.  He had seized on a long-simmering rivalry between indigenous Fijian nationalists and minority ethnic Indians, the economically powerful descendants of laborers brought by the British to work sugarcane fields, to justify his coup

The opposition Social Democratic Liberal Party, Sodelpa, won 15 seats and the National Federation Party won three.

Bainimarama is due to be sworn in as prime minister-elect during a ceremony on Monday.

The Fijian Elections Office said voter turnout was 84 percent with almost 500,000 ballots cast. Bainimarama alone won just over 200,000 votes, and, when other candidates from his party were added, Fiji First won 294,000 votes, or 59 percent of the total. Sodelpa candidates won 140,000 votes, or 28 percent of the total.

Parliamentary seats are allocated under a proportional system.

Five opposition parties that contested the election say they don't accept the result due to voting irregularities.

But a group of 92 international observers said the election was credible and they saw no evidence of fraud. It said the result broadly reflects the will of voters.

The election was "enthusiastically embraced by the voters of Fiji who were keen to participate in the democratic process," the Multinational Observer Group wrote in its preliminary findings. "The election was conducted in an atmosphere of calm, with an absence of electoral misconduct or evident intimidation."

The group said in a statement Monday it was ending its formal observation work now that the result had been declared.

Wire services