President's party tipped to win Indonesia vote

Voters arrive to register at a polling centre in Jakarta yesterday as Indonesia holds its third general election since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998 -- polls that will decide who can run for president in July. The mainly Muslim country's 171 million voters are to choose between thousands of candidates at local, provincial and national levels. Photo: AFP

Indonesia voted yesterday in only its third general election since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998, with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's Democratic Party tipped to win most seats.
The elections will decide who can run for president in July, when Yudhoyono will seek a second five-year term on the back of his sound economic management and progress in the fight against corruption.
Five people were killed in attacks overnight by suspected pro-independence rebels in eastern Papua province, but elsewhere in the vast archipelago the vote passed peacefully.
An unofficial tally by the independent Indonesian Survey Institute put the Democrats in front with 18.59 percent of the vote, based on a partial count from 2,100 ballot stations mainly in eastern Indonesia.
Analysts said the tally would change as more votes were counted but so far they are in line with pre-election opinion polls which put the centrist Democrats ahead of ex-president Megawati Sukarnoputri's Democratic Party of Struggle and Suharto's former ruling party, Golkar.
Official results may not be known for days.