SKOPJE, Macedonia (Reuters) -- Macedonia's deputy foreign minister Boris Trajkovski, the government's candidate, won the presidency in what international monitors said Monday was a generally fair runoff marred by some faults.
The Central Electoral Commission said that according to preliminary results Trajkovski, backed by the center-right government, led Tito Petkovski of the opposition Social Democratic Alliance (SDSM) of ex-communists by some 77,000 votes in Sunday's ballot. Turnout was 70 percent.Trajkovski, 43, overtook first-round leader Petkovski with massive last-minute support from ethnic Albanians, who make up one-third of the population of Macedonia.
The tiny republic is one of the poorest states in Europe, but it is seen by the West as a key to stability in the Balkans. It holds an important geopolitical position between Serbia and Greece to the north and south, and Bulgaria and Albania to the east and west.
It served as the main base for NATO troops when they moved into neighboring Kosovo earlier this year.
The fractured government opposition ran three candidates in the first round and Trajkovski's chances seemed small until Friday when the biggest Albanian Party DPA, a member of the coalition, called on its supporters to back him.
DPA said the Socialist Petkovski was pro-Serbian and that his victory would herald a return to communism.
Little-known Trajkovski hit the headlines during the Kosovo crisis earlier this year, when he accused the West of not giving Macedonia enough help to cope with the influx of 300,000 ethnic Albanian refugees from the Serbian province.
Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski told reporters that Trajkovski's victory would allow Macedonia to push ahead with reforms and bring it closer to the European Union. But most important, he said, was inter-ethnic consensus.
"We are very happy because there are no more divisions in the country," Georgievski said. "This is a new Macedonia, a strong Macedonia which will go into the next millennium."
Trajkovski, a former Methodist pastor, said his election was "a historic chance" for him and ended his speech with a prayer.
Petkovski and other SDSM leaders said the election was stolen by a massive fraud in Albanian-populated regions.
They claimed hoax voting was widespread and SDSM backers were harassed, and vowed to appeal against the result to the Central Electoral Commission and to international observers.
A statement by the mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said both rounds were generally fair but urged the authorities to look into a number of irregularities, mostly in the Albanian-populated areas.
"While the election was carried out according to the law in the vast majority of the country's polling stations, a number of polling stations in the west of the country and around Skopje experienced irregularities," it said.
There, the OSCE said, an extremely high turnout, large-scale hoax voting and cases of multiple voting raised concern. It said authorities should look into them "in order to verify the full legitimacy of these figures and to ensure full confidence in the results in all districts."
SDSM backers plan to hold a protest rally in Skopje on Monday evening.