BAKU -- Azerbaijan's ruling party claimed victory in parliamentary elections yesterday, but the government may also need to win a battle in the streets tomorrow after opposition parties vowed to protest against the results.

In an authoritarian country that has never had free elections, many opposition leaders hoped that this vote would lead to victory or such an obvious fraud that people would revolt.

The opposition's chances at the ballot box seemed poor, however. The Central Election Commission said preliminary results show the ruling Yeni (New) Azerbaijan Party would win 58 seats in the 125-seat parliament based on ballots from 28 per cent of the country's 5,000 polling stations.

"All is good," President Ilham Aliyev said, as he cast his ballot.

"The elections pass normally."

The norm for elections in this oil state over the past decade has been fraud and vote-rigging, and opposition politicians already seemed to be preparing for a repeat of the bloody demonstrations that followed the presidential elections in 2003.

"As we predicted there were widespread violations during the election," said Ali Kerimli, one of the leaders of the Azadliq (Freedom) bloc, a coalition of opposition parties that had secured only five seats as of last night.

"We will start a peaceful struggle to have the results of these rigged elections overturned," he said.

The election pitted YAP, which held 75 seats, against the Azadliq, which largely boycotted the last election.

Initial results from a U.S.-funded exit poll -- controversial because of its contractors' ties to the ruling party -- suggested that leading opposition figure Rasul Guliyev, the exiled leader of the Azerbaijan Democratic Party, had narrowly lost his race for a seat in absentia.

Analysts assumed that YAP would be declared the winner when official results were announced this morning. The conclusions of international observers, expected later in the day, will be more important because they will either encourage or dampen the opposition drive to pull people into the streets tomorrow.

Protesting in Azerbaijan is risky, because the government has promised to break up rallies with riot police, so the opposition is eager to build a strong case of widespread fraud.

One Azadliq official said his group has already recorded 5,947 violations of election procedure.

At polling stations in the Azizbayov district, about 30 kilometres outside of Baku, it was obvious that the election was not conducted with the same neutrality that might be expected in the West.

At every station visited, the chairman of the local election commission declared his support for YAP; Western observers had recommended reducing the ruling party's dominance of the electoral commissions in the months before the election, but the government rejected the idea.

In many places, people cast their ballots in rooms decorated with symbols of the regime, such as photographs of former president Heydar Aliyev or painted signs featuring quotations by the old KGB strongman.

At polling station No. 9 in the Azizbayov district, where the President's wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, 41, ran against several candidates, people argued loudly about why they were kept off the voters list and officials struggled to explain what had happened to a stack of missing ballots.

Agaddin Aliyev, a 70-year-old teacher and head of the local election commission, sat in a cramped backroom beside a battered old piano and tried to account for the ballots he had received from the Central Election Commission and the ones already used by voters.

When the numbers did not add up, Mr. Aliyev offered to let his visitors count everything themselves. After hundreds of ballot papers were leafed through and hundreds of signatures on voter-registration lists were checked, about 70 ballots could not be traced.

Mr. Aliyev said he could not explain the discrepancy.

"How should I know?" he asked "I didn't count them."

It was just one of many irregularities and suspicious activities reported at polling stations across Azerbaijan yesterday.

Opposition parties and independent observers complained about bribery, intimidation, stuffed ballot boxes, multiple voting and failures to use safeguards such as the finger-inking procedure that was intended to avoid tampering with the elections.