By Diadie Ba

DAKAR, Feb 26 (Reuters) - President Abdoulaye Wade's camp said he was headed for a first-round win on Monday in Senegal's high-turnout election, but poll authorities warned against calling the result too soon.

Wade's prediction that he would win with more than half the vote, which his 14 challengers said would be impossible to achieve without fraud, has raised fears of unrest in one of the few African states not to have had a coup since independence.

Prime Minister Macky Sall, Wade's campaign manager, said partial figures compiled from its representatives at polling stations showed record turnout of 70 percent with a strong lead of around 57 percent for the octogenarian Wade.

"These results (show) irrefutably that the candidate Abdoulaye Wade is well clear of the 50 percent needed to be elected in the first round," Sall said in the early hours of Monday as supporters played music and danced outside Wade's Democratic Party's headquarters.

Official provisional results were expected later on Monday. If no candidate wins a majority, a second-round run-off is scheduled for mid-March.

"These are not official results and do not contribute to a climate of serenity," a spokesman for the Autonomous National Electoral Commission (CENA) said late on Sunday after Wade's supporters said the president was headed for a first-round win.

Wade swept to power in 2000, ending four decades of Socialist Party rule in what was at the time one of Africa's first transfers from one elected government to another, boosting the West African country's credentials as a peaceful democracy.

Backers of Socialist Party candidate Ousmane Tanor Dieng, who had said they had "credible information ... of a planned strategy of fraud", dismissed Wade's early victory claims as "fantasy".

An economic liberal, Wade has campaigned on ambitious job-creation projects to build highways, five-star hotels, railways and airports to stem an exodus of desperate young migrants leaving for Europe.

Opponents criticise him for failing to tackle rural poverty, weak infrastructure, rising prices and a lack of jobs in a country where more than half the 12 million population is under 18 and most people live by farming and fishing.

Apart from a long-running low-level insurgency by separatists in the southern province of Casamance, political violence is rare in Senegal.

But tensions have spilled over into isolated clashes during the campaign, stoking fears of further trouble should the opposition reject the results.

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