Islamic Brotherhood claims win in Egypt presidential race
CAIRO. June 19. KAZINFORM With 100 percent of the votes counted, Islamic Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi has claimed victory in the Egyptian presidential election, winning 52 percent of the ballots, his campaign headquarters claimed on Monday morning, Kazinform refers to RIA Novosti.
The opposing candidate, former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, gained 48 percent.
"These are confirmed results, all counted ballots from all voting stations are with written guarantees of the election commissions," Mursi's campaign headquarters said.
Mursi's pre-election campaign website is already adorned with a banner proclaiming "Mohammed Mursi, first elected President of Egypt."
Egypt's higher election commission has dismissed the claims by some candidates to have won the election as "too early," and said it is not responsible for the dissemination by the media of election results. The commission said the formal results would only be known on June 21 after a declaration of the official poll results.
If Mursi's victory is confirmed, he will be the first president of Egypt representing an Islamic party, and also the first leader of modern Egypt without a military background.
In his pre-election manifesto, Mursi promised that in the event of his election as president, he would resign as the leader of the Freedom and Justice Party.
He also promised to give up Egypt's tradition of one-man presidential rule, and said he would name deputies, assistants and advisers representing different sectors of Egyptian society.
Mursi won the first round of the election, in no small part due to the mass activism of the Islamic Brotherhood, the largest political movement in the country.
An engineer by profession, Mursi, 60, was educated in the United States. He was elected to parliament several times in the Mubarak era as an independent deputy.
Mursi was initially the back-up candidate for the Freedom and Justice Party.
He emerged as the main candidate after the previous leader, the deputy of the Muslim Brotherhood's supreme council, Khairat ash-Shatir, withdrew.
Meanwhile, a revolutionary youth group urged the country's citizens to oppose the "military coup" in a demonstration on Tahrir Square in central Cairo on Tuesday.
The April 6 Youth movement said it is necessary to protest the new Constitutional declaration which "hands the power to the military and turns the new president into a useless figurehead attached to the Military Council."
The demonstration will also express protest against the dissolution of parliament and the usurpation of power by the military.