Wellington - Pro-democracy campaigners, including three men facing sedition charges, made a clean sweep in the "commoners' vote" at a general election in the Pacific island feudal kingdom of Tonga, according to reports from the capital Nukualofa on Friday.

Akilisi Pohiva, a prominent leader of the pro-democracy movement campaigning for the traditional supreme powers of the king over Tonga's 119,000 people, topped Friday's poll, the Tonga Online website said.

Pohiva and two colleagues, Isileli Pulu and Clive Edwards, who were also returned, are awaiting trial on sedition charges arising from pro-democracy riots in which eight people died and three-quarters of Nukualofa was destroyed by fires in November 2006.

All nine candidates elected in Thursday's vote by Tongan voters are from the pro-democracy movement, according to a Radio New Zealand reporter in Nukualofa.

"The result sends a clear signal that voters want representatives with a track record of campaigning for political change," he said.

But the nine People's Representatives will be matched in parliament by nine traditional chiefs who were chosen by ballot among the 29 so-called nobles of Tonga's ruling class on Thursday.

And King George Tupou V will appoint 15 more members of parliament, including all the ministers, retaining the monarch's supreme powers.

Reports said fewer than half the 67,000 voters registered cast their ballots after they were hampered in assessing candidates and their policies by a government decree banning the state-owned Tonga Broadcasting Commission from interviewing those standing for election and attending press conferences.

Tonga, which comprises 170 palm-fringed islands set in the Pacific halfway between New Zealand and South America, is one of the world's last feudal monarchies and smallest and poorest nations.

The royal family have traditionally lived globe-trotting lives of luxury, financed by the country's meagre national income from exporting pumpkins and fish to Japan and donations from their poverty-stricken subjects who are largely financed by relatives living overseas. (dpa)