Dubai: The ruling Fatah faction emerged the leading party in Palestinian parliament elections last night and the militant group Hamas came in as a strong second, according to an exit poll conducted by the West Bank's An Najah University.
In the first Palestinian parliamentary election in a decade, people thronged ballot booths yesterday to elect the 132-member parliament out of scores of eligible candidates from Fatah, Hamas and independents.
Hours after polling closed, a pollster at the university said Fatah won more than 46 per cent of the votes and Hamas more than 30 per cent, based on a survey among 6,500 voters. The pollster said the Third Way, a party led by former Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, came third. Nearly 1.3 million voters were eligible to cast their ballots.
Earlier, after voting ended in the West Bank and Gaza Strip at 1700 GMT, a senior member of the Fatah campaign team said that the movement had "won comfortably."
"We think that Fatah has comfortably won the elections," Mohammad Shtay-yeh, a Cabinet minister, was quoted as telling AFP.
A steady stream of voters lined up from the morning, eager to vote in what many analysts said would a decisive election for the future of the Middle East. The central elections commission put the turnout at 73 per cent, half an hour before polling stations closed.
"People started to gather outside the polling booths even before they opened at 7am," Ramiz Ba'lousheh, a 24-year-old worker with the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza, told Gulf News. "Of course I am enthusiastic, we all are. We need somebody to represent us and solve our problems," he added.
Internal issues such as the precarious security condition, reforms and corruption have been the major poll planks for most candidates. "This means that the political issues [peace talks with Israel] is not the priority for the first time," Palestinian journalist and writer Khalil Al Assali told Gulf News in an interview from Occupied Jerusalem.
"This is the first election in 10 years," said political analyst Ali Jarbawi. "This is a very important election on the interal front ... but I don't think it is crucial for the political settlement, because it was Israel which brushed away the issue," Jarbawi told Gulf News in an interview from Ramallah.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the poll a decisive step on the road to independence, a view echoed by Israel's acting leader Ehud Olmert.
