Balaguer Won Dominican Vote, Delayed Ballot Count Shows

Joaquin Balaguer, a 78-year-old former president blinded by glaucoma, is the winner of the Dominican presidential election, according to nearly complete voting returns issued Sunday after a weeklong delay.

Balaguer, the conservative leader of the Social Christian Reformist Party, received 857,942 votes, or 41.6% of the valid ballots from the May 16 contest. Jacobo Majluta, a member of the ruling Dominican Revolutionary Party, received 814,676 votes, or 39.5%.

Juan Bosch, a Marxist who heads the Dominican Liberation Party, finished third with 379,269 votes, or 18.4%. Three other candidates shared less than 1% of the votes in this country’s sixth presidential elections since the 1965 civil war.

Outcome Won’t Change

The returns were compiled from 5,947 of the country’s 6,024 polling places. The votes remaining to be tallied in the official-but-provisional returns cannot alter the outcome.

Announcement of results was delayed by a crisis in the Central Electoral Board that stalled vote counting May 18 and raised political tensions in this Caribbean nation of 6 million people.

The crisis began two days after the elections, when Balaguer held the lead with more than nine-tenths of the returns in. Majluta, 51, said then that the vote had been “adulterated” by irregularities.

During the week, his party insisted on a review of all poll reports previously tabulated in the partial returns and of all invalidated and challenged votes. In Sunday’s returns, there were 84,000 invalidated votes and 28,000 challenged votes.

As the electoral board prepared to resume the vote count Sunday afternoon, Majluta’s official observers at the board headquarters announced that they were boycotting the procedures.

In 1978 elections, when Balaguer lost the presidency after 12 years in power, the armed forces tried to keep him in office by intervening in the vote count. U.S. pressure helped end the intervention, and Balaguer conceded defeat.

The Dominican Revolutionary Party has held power since then. But its popularity has been eroded by economic hardships and charges of massive corruption.

Outgoing President Jorge Salvador Blanco imposed unpopular austerity measures to comply with conditions set by the International Monetary Fund in return for an IMF loan program.

Food-price subsidies were cut, and prices soared. In April, 1984, at least 86 people were killed by security forces in food riots.

Balaguer said in his campaign this year that he would have been more efficient and flexible in imposing austerity measures, which he agreed were needed.

Balaguer’s economic policies are expected to be conservative.

“We’ll see much more of a private-sector orientation under Balaguer, much more of an orientation to free enterprise than you had under Jorge Blanco,” said a foreign economist.

Balaguer’s opponents have insisted on raising the question of how effective a blind man can be as president, but he has dismissed the issue. “I am not going to be asked to thread needles when in office,” he told reporters during the campaign.