Dos Santos party takes 74% in early Angola vote results

LUANDA (AFP) - The ruling party of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos took a large lead in the first returns from this week's parliamentary vote, electoral commission spokeswoman Julia Ferreira said Saturday.

With about 58 percent of ballots counted, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) took 74 percent of the ballots, she said.

The main opposition Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) was a distant second with nearly 18 percent and the new Casa party in third with 4.5 percent.

Angolans voted Friday for 220 members of parliament, with the leader of the winning party to become president.

Dos Santos, who has already ruled Angola for 33 years, is tipped to retain power amid demands from the country's poor for a slice of its oil wealth.

He has ruled Africa's second leading oil producer through its devastating civil war and then through an oil boom that over the last decade has transformed the country into one of the world's fastest growing economies.

The elections are the country's second peacetime and the third since independence from Portugal in 1975.

The MPLA took 81 percent of the vote in the last elections in 2008, which was the first ballot held after the 27-year civil war ended in 2002.