Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the former general and servant of a dictator who became one of south-east Asia's most successful democratic leaders, appeared to be heading for a first round victory after early returns in yesterday's Indonesian presidential election.

Final results are not expected for several days, but exit polls and the incomplete results suggested that he has narrowly succeeded in winning more than half of nationwide votes necessary to win re-election without a second round of voting against the runner up.

One survey of 2000 polling stations in all 33 of Indonesia's provinces suggested that Mr Yudhoyono had 54 percent of the vote, compared to 24 per cent for the former president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, and 22 per cent for the current vice-president, Jusuf Kalla.

Other television polls gave him 54 per cent and 50.5 per cent, and only one suggested that he had narrowly failed to reach the necessary half way point with 48.8 per cent.

Voting appeared to have taken place peacefully across Indonesia's 17,000 islands, although there was a disturbance in the province of West Papua, where guerrillas have been fighting a low level war for independence.

Police were reported to have fired back at an unidentified group who attacked a police post and set fire to three cars, close to the US-owned Freeport copper mine.

If the early results are sustained, Mr Yudhoyono will become the first Indonesian president ever to be democratically re-elected - a triumph for his cautious, unostentatious style of politics and confirmation of the remarkable political stability which has taken root in Indonesia, only eleven years after the fall of the longstanding dictator, Suharto.

"God willing, in the next five years, the world will say, 'Indonesia is something - Indonesia is rising,'" he said last weekend at a rally of supporters of his Democrat Party.

All three candidates talk in broad terms about the importance of justice, the alleviation of poverty and an end to corruption.

Mrs Megawati served a disappointing term as president, but benefits from her status as daughter of Indonesia's founding president, Sukarno. Mr Kalla is a successful businessman whose party, Golkar, is a reformed version of the late President Suharto's political vehicle.

The most striking difference between them is not their policies, or even personalities, but their running mates. Mr Yudhoyono's candidate for vice-president is Boediono, an economist and former governor of the Bank of Indonesia. But his rivals have allied themselves with two of the most controversial characters from Indonesia's recent history.

Mr Kalla is running with Wiranto, the former head of the armed forces, who was indicted, although never brought to trial, for crimes against humanity by United Nations prosecutors investigating the violence which followed East Timor's vote for independence from Indonesia.

Mrs Megawati has made an even more incongruous alliance with Prabowo Subianto, a former general in the Indonesian Special Forces, and the son-in-law and protégé of Suharto. He defended his patron by kidnapping young human rights activists, several of whom have never been seen since.

Mr Yudhoyono's campaign has emphasised a continuation of the policies of the past four years, including aid and food subsidies to the poor and economic stability. Indonesia has weathered the global financial crisis, certainly compared to the catastrophic Asian economic crisis of 1997, which directly led to the fall of Suharto the following year.

Unusually among its Asian neighbours, Indonesia's economic growth is more than 4 per cent, although unemployment remains uncomfortably high at 8.2 per cent.

A dispute over lists of eligible voters, which have been found to contain millions of false or multiple names, as well as omitting many eligible citizens, appeared to have been resolved on Tuesday after representations by Mr Yudhoyono's opponents. Indonesia's Constitutional Court announced that Indonesians who had not been registered could still vote yesterday by showing identity cards.

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