"According to our projections, we can say that the UMP candidate (Guelleh of the Union for the Presidential Majority) has been elected in the first round" following yesterday's election, Prime Minister Abdoulkader Kamil Mohamed announced on national television.
As with the previous election in 2011, the announcement was made before all the votes were in, but with the 68-year-old Guelleh said to be easily above the 50 per cent threshold required to avoid a second-round of voting.
Some 187,000 people -- around a fifth of the population -- were eligible to vote.
"The people of Djibouti have followed the path of wisdom, stability, security and development," said the prime minister.
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Some opposition parties had called for a boycott of the election, as they had done in previous elections, and with turnout low throughout the day the electoral commission extended polling by an hour to 1600 GMT.
Guelleh was always the clear front-runner against a fractured opposition in the former French colony.
Looking relaxed and smiling, the head of state cast his vote in the centre of Djibouti City earlier in the day accompanied by his wife.
"I'm very confident," he said. "I think the vote will go well."
Several opposition candidates complained that their representatives had been turned away from a number of polling stations.
With a population of 875,000 people, Djibouti is little more than a port with a country attached, but it has leveraged its position on one of the world's busiest shipping routes.
It is home to Washington's only permanent base in Africa, which is used for operations in Yemen -- just across the Gulf of Aden -- as well as the fight against the Islamist Shebab in Somalia and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).