BURKINA FASO’S President Roch Marc Christian Kabore has been declared the winner of Sunday’s presidential election with 57.9 per cent of the majority votes, the electoral commission announced on Thursday.

His main challengers, Eddie Komboigo and Zephirin Diabre got 15.5 per cent and 12.5 per cent respectively.

Kabore, 63, has been under fire for his response to a five-year-old jihadist insurgency that has rolled in from Mali.

He was predicted to win the first round of elections and by winning an overall majority in the first round Kabore avoids a run-off election in which he would have had to stand against a single candidate backed by a united opposition party.

The elections on Sunday were held for both legislature and presidency. The results declared by the commission, known as CENI, showed that Kabore led with more than 235,000 votes.

The paramount court, the Constitutional Council, has a week in which to confirm the outcome of the elections.

One of the poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso is struggling with a jihadist campaign that has claimed at least 1,200 lives since 2015 and forced around a million people to flee their homes.

Opposition parties maintain the votes were marked by fraud and flawed procedures, threatening to reject “results stained by irregularities.

Their complaints range from polling stations that either did not open or opened late, insecure handling of ballot boxes and arbitrary changes to voting areas.

Because of the unrest, the election was not held across at least one-fifth of the territory, denying up to 350,000 people the right to vote, according to CENI’s figures.

Pro-Kabore parties on Tuesday argued that all candidates were equally affected by the problems and that in any case, these were not on a scale to have any major impact on the result.