People in Togo are preparing to go to the polls in long-delayed parliamentary elections. Thursday's vote is seen as an indication of what will happen in the presidential elections next year. Experts say it could expose weaknesses in the grip of the Gnassingbe family which has ruled the West African country for more than four decades. Opposition groups have held mass protests over the government's last-minute changes to the electoral code. They say constituency boundaries were manipulated to benefit the ruling party. Angry demonstrations caused the parliamentary vote to be postponed from October 2012. Fires The polls have been rescheduled twice since then, as mediators struggled to bring government and opposition into agreement. President Faure Gnassingbe took power in 2005 following the death of his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema, who ruled Togo for 38 years. He was re-elected in 2010, though there was deadly street violence in the run-up to the poll and complaints of vote rigging. A total of 1,174 candidates are standing in Thursday's elections, with 159 women among them. The main opposition parties including Unir and the UFC (Union Forces for Change) have formed two blocs to contest the vote - the Rainbow Coalition and the Let's Save Togo Movement. Tensions in the run up to the elections have been raised by a number of mysterious fires. The opposition has accused the government of using the fires as a pretext to arrest its activists. Togo is among the world's poorest countries. Its last parliamentary elections in 2007 were deemed by international observers to be relatively fair.