NOUAKCHOTT: Mauritania's ruling party was leading in nationwide polls held last month, according to partial results released Sunday, while a closely-watched Islamist party trailed behind.
According to results from Mauritania's electoral commission seen by AFP, President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz's Union for the Republic (UPR) took 36 of the 65 seats available in round one of the parliamentary and local polls held on November 23.
The main Islamist party Tewassoul won six seats.
Analysts are watching closely to see how the party, which is taking part in elections for the first time since becoming a legal entity in 2007, will fare.
Tewassoul, the only member of the 11-party Coordination of Democratic Opposition (COD) to resist a boycott and take part in last weekend's vote, claimed the poll was marred by fraud.
Two other opposition parties, El-Wiam and the People's Progressive Alliance (APP), took five and three seats respectively in the elections, the first parliamentary and local polls held since 2006.
Fifteen other seats went to other smaller parties.
Results showed the UPR also performed well in municipal polls, winning around a third of councils in constituencies where results had been counted.
Around 1,500 candidates from 74 parties representing the administration and the moderate section of the opposition, which did not follow the boycott, were vying for a total 146 seats in parliament and the leadership of 218 councils.
Around a third of Mauritania's population of 3.4 million were eligible to vote.
On Friday the electoral commission announced a record voter turnout of 75 percent for the poll, seen as a test for Aziz five years after he came to power in a coup and four years after he won a widely contested presidential vote.
The mainly-Muslim republic, a former French colony on the west coast of the Sahara desert, is seen by the West as strategically important in the fight against Al-Qaeda-linked groups within its own borders, as well in neighbouring Mali and across Africa's Sahel region.
Full results will not be known until after a second round of polling in 15 constituencies, set for December 7.
Forty of the remaining 81 seats still to be decided will be drawn from two electoral lists, with 20 seats reserved for women.
Critics have accused the electoral commission of being too slow in releasing results, a delay the body blamed on the complexity of the process.