LOME, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The voting process of Togo's presidential election ended in calmness at 4 p.m. on Saturday and the counting process started immediately after the closure of all the polling stations.
"The current situation is generally calm and there are no major security incidents to report," according to a press release from the Force Command presidential election security force, a special force of 10,000 elements which ensures security of the electoral process.
For the moment, a campaign manager of candidate Jean-Pierre Fabre, leader of the National Alliance for Change (ANC), has estimated that outgoing president Faure Gnassingbe candidate of Union for the Republic (UNIR), ruling party of Togo, and the candidate Messan Agbeyome Kodjo of the Patriotic Movement for Democracy and Development (MPDD) are in the leading position.
"The first trends of the voting results put the candidates of the MPDD and UNIR in lead." wrote Patrick Lawson-Banku, the ANC's candidate's campaign manager, in a statement on Sunday.
Saturday night when receving group interview, candidate Kodjo declared himself "largely in the lead" in Grand Lome, in the Maritime region, south of Togo.
"I am sure I will win the first round of presidential election," said Messan Agbeyome Kodjo.
Seven candidates are running for the presidentiall election, including the outgoing president Faure Gnassingbe who has been in power since 2005 and is seeking a fourth term.
Among the other candidates, all from the opposition, the former Prime Minister and ex-president of the National Assembly Agbeyome Messan Kodjo and Jean-Pierre Fabre were real challengers.
More than 3.6 million voters registered on the electoral roll, including 348 at the diaspora level, were expected at the polls to express their choice in 9,389 polling stations, according to figures from the CENI.
Twenty Togolese civil society organizations have deployed around 3,000 national observers across the country.
In addition, 280 international observers, mostly from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union, followed the voting process.
