The Islamist current's big win in the legislative elections in Bahrain should be mainly attributed to a boycott of the polls by the Gulf state's influential opposition forces, analysts said Friday.

Islamists, chiefly from the Sunni fundamentalist Salafi current, have clinched five of parliament's 40 seats.

Another 17 Sunni and Shiite Islamists have a good chance of coming out on top in a runoff slated for October 31, according to official results of Thursday's vote.

The winners and potential winners include the heads of three Islamist Salafi political associations.

Adel Adel al-Muawda of Al-Asala and Salah Ali of the National Islamic Forum were elected in the first round, while Al-Shura chief Abdul Rahman Abdul Salam seems assured of victory in runoffs in constituencies where the two candidates who won the highest number of votes will face off next week.

News of the turnout of 53.2 percent of the 243,000 eligible voters, which exceeded the most optimistic expectations, was splashed across the front pages of Friday's press in the Gulf archipelago.

The authorities were jubilant over the perceived rebuff to the four opposition groups which had called for a boycott of the polls.

The United States was quick to applaud Bahrain's first legislative elections since the 1975 dissolution of a parliament elected only two years earlier.

"We applaud Bahrain's commitment to political reform and we strongly encourage the Bahraini government to continue down this path," State Department spokesman Gregg Sullivan said.

"Hypocrites!" screamed Ali Rabia of the leftist National Democratic Action Association, one of the four boycott groups.

"The Americans were dreading the election of Salafi figures like Muawda who not so long ago was equating democracy with atheism and corruption. They are now happy about the elections when there is nothing to be happy about," he told AFP.

"The Salafis have always been on the political sidelines and are out of touch with Bahrainis' real concerns. The elected (Salafis) are intruders in political life," said Rabia, a member of the elected parliament scrapped in 1975.

"They took advantage of the refusal of (representative) political forces to participate in the elections to take over the political arena," he fumed.

Apart from the NDAA, the ballot was shunned by the Islamic National Accord Association (INAA), the main political formation of Bahrain's majority Shiite Muslim population, the Nationalist Democratic Rally, which is a pan-Arab nationalist group, and the Islamic Action Association, a Shiite grouping.

The deputy chairman of the Bahraini Center for Human Rights, Nabil Rajab, said the Salafis preparing to take their seats in parliament were "obscurantists, not unlike the Taliban," Afghanistan's radical former ruling militia toppled by the US-led campaign last year against the country.

"The other half of the Bahraini population has been crippled," said Qatar University political science professor Mohammad al-Mesfer.

"There must have been something wrong in the voting mechanism," he told AFP.

The four groups boycotted the election in protest at an amendment to the 1973 constitution stipulating that legislative power be split equally between the elected chamber and a consultative council to be appointed by Bahrain's King Hamad.

INAA number two Hassam Meshaimeh said the outcome of the vote was "unfair."

The boycott had gone ahead because the government turned down the opposition's offer of "a dialogue to resolve the crisis," he said.

"We will not accept a fait accompli. The (new) parliament will not be able to make tangible gains for citizens," said Meshaimeh, vowing to "keep up pressure by peaceful means to ... restore genuine parliamentary life".

Thirty-seven seats were up for grabs in Thursday's contest, three having earlier been automatically awarded either because the candidates stood unopposed or because their rivals pulled out of the race.

Two of eight women candidates made it to the second round, while the rest were defeated.AFP