Opposition candidate declared Congo's next president. Observers say he's the wrong opposition candidate.

Early Thursday, election officials in the Democratic Republican of Congo "provisionally" declared opposition candidate Felix Tshisekedi winner of a long-delayed presidential election, setting up the first democratic transfer of power in sub-Saharan Africa's largest county since its independence in 1960. According to the national election commission, Tshisekedi got about seven million votes, narrowly beating another opposition candidate, Martin Fayulu, with 6.4 million votes, and far outpacing Emmanuel Shadary, the hand-picked successor of outgoing President Joseph Kabila, with 4.4 million votes.

Polls before the Dec. 30 election showed Fayulu with a commanding lead, and outside observers and institutions — notably the Catholic Church, which deployed 40,000 election observers — considered him the true victor. The Catholic observers and another domestic election-watching organization said there was widespread irregularities or outright fraud.

Just before the electoral commission named him the runner-up, Fayulu said it's an "open secret" that Tshisekedi had entered a power-sharing agreement with Shandary and the Kabila government. "My response is simple," he wrote: "The Congolese people deserve the truth of the ballot, not another backroom arrangement." He can legally appeal the results to the constitutional court.

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Kabila — who took power after his father, Laurant Kabila, was assassinated in 2001 — delayed the elections for two years past when his second and final term was supposed to end in 2016, and analysts say he favored Tshisekedi as his best remaining option because he views him as more pliable and less likely to tackle corruption in Kabila's circle. Still, The New York Times reports, "the election commission's early-morning announcement amounted to a startling admission by the government that Mr. Kabila's candidate had suffered a defeat so big that his government — in power for 18 years — could not simply hand him the presidency without risking widespread violence and international condemnation."

Congolese security forces are bracing for violence and on Wednesday, the U.S. State Department advised all Americans in the country to leave.