CAIRO - The two surviving candidates in Egypt's presidential election appealed Saturday for support from voters who rejected them as polarizing extremists in the first round, and the third-place finisher contested the preliminary results.
Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, vowed he won't revive the old authoritarian regime as he sought to cast off his image as an anti-revolution figure, while the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate, Mohammed Morsi, reached out to those fearful of hard-line Islamic rule and the rise of a religious state.
Many votes are up for grabs, but the two candidates will have a tough battle wooing the middle ground voters amid calls from activists for a boycott of the divisive vote.
Adding to the uncertainty, Hamdeen Sabahi called for a partial vote recount, citing violations that he claimed could change the outcome. Sabahi, a socialist and a champion of the poor, came in third by a margin of some 700,000 votes, leaving him out of the next round to be held on June 16-17.
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Many Egyptians were dismayed by the results, left to choose between a military-rooted strongman promising a firm hand to ensure stability and Islamists repressed under the old regime who have become the most powerful political force in post-revolutionary Egypt.
Each candidate has die-hard supporters but is also loathed by significant sectors of the population.
The first round race was tight. Preliminary counts Friday from stations around the country reported by the state news agency gave Morsi 25.3 percent and Shafiq 24.9 percent with less than 100,000 votes difference. The election commission said about 50 percent of more than 50 million eligible voters turned out for the first round, which had 13 contenders.
A large chunk of the vote - more than 40 percent - went to candidates who were seen as more in the spirit of the uprising that toppled Mubarak, that is neither from the Brotherhood nor from the so-called "feloul," or "remnants" of the old autocratic regime.
Sabahi came in third with a surprisingly strong showing of 21.5 percent.
Shafiq, the last prime minister to serve under Mubarak, spent much of his campaign for the first round criticizing the revolution that ousted his former boss. But on Saturday, he vowed there would be no "re-creation of the old regime.
"I am fed up with being labeled 'old regime,'" Shafiq said at a news conference in his campaign headquarters in Cairo. When pressed on the issue, he said: "All Egyptians are part of the old regime."
A former air force commander and a personal friend of Mubarak's, Shafiq was booted out of office by a wave of street protests shortly after Mubarak stepped down on Feb. 11, 2011.
Shafiq also held out the possibility of naming Sabahi as a deputy if elected president - an apparent bid to draw supporters of the third-place finisher to his side.
Sabahi later said he was not ready to accept the results released by regional commissions. The Central Election Commission planned to release official results in the coming few days.
He spoke before a crowd of about 3,000 people outside his headquarters in Giza. Some broke out in tears.
