Sisi sweeps election as Egypt military reasserts grip

CAIRO: Ex-army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has scored a crushing presidential election triumph and consolidated the military´s grip, 11 months after the overthrow of the only Egyptian president not drawn from its ranks.

Ninety-six percent of voters, at least 21 million Egyptians, chose Sisi, who deposed elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, with ballots counted from all but a handful of 352 stations, state television reported Thursday.

Sisi´s only electoral rival, leftist leader Hamdeen Sabbahi, won less than four percent, according to the preliminary results.

The longtime opposition figure conceded defeat on Thursday but cast doubt on the estimated turnout figure of 47 percent after calls for a high participation rate as a sign of legitimacy.

Ahead of the final results due within a week, hundreds of Sisi supporters took to the streets on Wednesday night to celebrate, waving Egyptian flags, setting off fireworks and honking car horns.

"It´s a victory for stability," said Tahra Khaled, among the crowd in Cairo´s Tahrir Square, nerve centre of the mass protests that forced autocratic president Hosni Mubarak to step down in 2011.Sisi, who retired from the army to run for office, becomes Egypt´s fifth president from the military, reasserting the institution´s grip on politics in the Arab world´s most populous nation.

The military has always formed the backbone of political life in Egypt and the institution has provided its leaders ever since army officers toppled the monarchy in 1952.The only exception was Morsi, elected a year after the fall of Mubarak, himself a former air force commander.

"Few would have imagined that... three years after Mubarak´s toppling, a field marshall, a new pharaoh, would be elected again with 96 percent, without even unveiling a programme and without campaigning," said analyst Karim Bitar.

Sisi rode on a wave of support for a potential new strongman who can restore stability and revive the economy after three years of turmoil.

But his opponents say that since he ousted Morsi last July, Egypt returned to autocracy.A state crackdown targeting Morsi supporters has left at least 1,400 people dead in street clashes and seen more than 15,000 others jailed.

Dozens of young activists have also been jailed for violating a law banning all but police-authorised protests.

A European Union team that observed the election said Thursday the vote was conducted "in line with the law," although it regretted the lack of participation of some "stakeholders", in a likely reference to Morsi´s banned Muslim Brotherhood and youth dissident groups.