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An e conomist picked by Malawi's outgoing President Bakili Mulizi as his successor and an opposition leader were in a neck-and-neck race in the presidential election in the southern African country, state radio said Friday.

Bingu wa Mutharika of the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF) was leading in the densely populated south but Gwanda Chakuamba of the Mgwirizano (Unity) Coalition was scoring well throughout the country, the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Voters went to the polls on Thursday in the country's third multi-party polls in a decade to elect a successor to Muluzi, who is reluctantly stepping down after two terms.

Muluzi came to power after defeating self-proclaimed president-for-life Kamuzu Banda in the country's first multi-party polls in 1994. Banda ruled the impoverished country with an iron fist for three decades.

Muluzi unsuccessfully tried to change the constitution to allow him a third term in office but parliament rejected the motion.

Ballot counting began late Thursday after polls closed but official results have yet to be released.

"The two are scoring highly among the presidential candidates," said the radio report.

The report said the three other opposition contenders were faring badly: John Tembo of the Malawi Congress party, Brown Mpinganjira of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and independent candidate Justin Malewezi.

Some 5,7-million voters were registered for the elections in the country of 11-million people after a revised list controversially whittled down the number of voters by nearly a million.

A total of 1 254 candidates - 356 of them independents - are vying for seats in the 193-member parliament.

Over 200 international observers from the European Union, Commonwealth, African Union and Southern African Development Community monitored the elections.

The leader of the EU observer team late Thursday gate the polls a broad thumbs up.

"There were no serious incidents in the country as far as we know and it is a very good sign," Marieke Sandersten Holt told AFP.

But on Friday, the 14-member Commonwealth observer team issued an interim report which was mixed and stopped short of calling the polls "free and fair."

"The atmosphere at the polling stations was peaceful and we found no evidence of intimidation at the polls," the leader of the group, Tanzanian former prime minister Joseph Warioba, said in the statement.

But on the minus side "we noted the serious inadequacies in the registration process and the inability of the electoral commission to resolve some important issues," he said, including the fact that several voters' rolls were used.

The Commonwealth observers said they were also "deeply concerned about the gross bias of the public media and the misuse of the advantages of incumbency is also a matter of grave concern to us."

Warioba said in their final report, the team would "determine whether the elections were free and fair."

Malawi's chief election officer Roosevelt Gondwe told reporters Friday that the counting of votes was "progressing slowly," adding that results were expected to be announced late Saturday.

A former British colony wedged between Mozambique and Zambia, Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, with an annual average per capita income of $210 and most people living on far less than a dollar a day.

It is also one of the hardest-hit by Aids which has brought life expectancy down to 36 and ranks 163 out of 173 according to a development scale by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). - Sapa

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