Cairo, June 18 (IANS/RIA Novosti) With all votes counted in the Egyptian presidential election, Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi has claimed victory winning 52 percent of the votes, his campaign office said Monday.
The opposing candidate, former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, got 48 percent.
"These are confirmed results, all counted ballots from all voting stations are with written guarantees of the election commission," Mursi's campaign office said.
Mursi's pre-election campaign website is already carrying a banner proclaiming "Mohammed Mursi, first elected President of Egypt".
If the victory of the 60-year-old Mursi 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.
An engineer by profession, Mursi was educated in the US. He was elected to parliament several times in the Mubarak era as an independent candidate.
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.
Ahmed Shafiq was the last prime minister in the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak.
A spokesman for Shafiq's election campaign office said they could not confirm the data provided by the rival candidate's staff but they would wait for the final official results, expected to be announced June 21.
The country's ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is due to hand over power to the new president July 1.
--IANS/RIA Novosti
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