NEWS ANALYSIS : Complicated Vote Count Adds Up to Hard Bargaining on a Coalition : Hungary: The election system results in few outright victories. But both front-running parties see a rosy future.

Peter Tolgyessy, the 32-year-old wizard of the Alliance of Free Democrats, called it “the most complicated election system in the world.” This was almost the only assessment of the Hungarian parliamentary elections that stood unchallenged Monday.

The two parties with the highest number of votes, Tolgyessy’s liberal Free Democrats and the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum, both claimed to have taken the commanding ground in position for a second round of runoff elections on April 8. The arguments for both sides sound plausible, although it helps to have a good head for numbers to follow the logic.

With approximately 98% of the vote shared by 10 political parties, the Democratic Forum, known for its strong nationalistic appeal and its “middle way” approach to reforming the Hungarian economy, led the pack with 24% of the vote. The Free Democrats, seen as an intellectual’s party with a fast-track plan to lead the country away from 40 years of communism, came in second with less than 21% of the vote.

The Hungarian Socialist Party, the former Communists, ran fourth, with just about 10% of the popular vote.

From this point, however, Hungary’s electoral complications take over--a mix of directly elected representatives from individual constituencies and proportional representation in which lists of candidates are chosen at the county and national level. There is even a concept known as the “scrap vote,” in which votes that went to the losers are pooled and doled out to the parties on a proportional basis.

The upshot of this arithmetical free-for-all is that after one day’s voting--the first free elections here since 1945--only five candidates directly won seats in Parliament without having to participate in the runoff in two weeks.

The second clear result is that Hungarian politicians will face some long days of hard bargaining in the weeks ahead in an effort to put together a coalition that can elect a prime minister and form a government.

A third result may well be that, when the bargaining is done, Hungary will wind up with a political system that has moved further toward the Western model than any of its reforming East European neighbors, principally Czechoslovakia and Poland, where Civic Forum and Solidarity, respectively, have the Communist Party or its successor as the main opposition force. In Hungary, the opposition party is almost certain to be non-Communist.

The leaders of the Free Democrats and the Democratic Forum sounded certain Monday that they would not entertain the notion of inviting their leading rivals to join them in putting together a coalition.

“Perhaps in some ways our programs seem similar,” said Joszef Antall, the Democratic Forum leader, “but in some matters the Democratic and the Republican parties in the United States seem similar as well. They still remain in opposition to each other.”

“The differences between us are significant,” Tolgyessy said when pressed on whether his party would consider an alliance with the Democratic Forum.

“The Democratic Forum signed an agreement with the former state party (the Communists) on a policy favoring a long-term transition. We believe in a speedy transition.

“We would like a ‘silent state,’ that is, one that interferes as little as possible.

“We advocate a speedy course toward privatization; they want a slower one.

“We see these as primordial differences--differences enough to oppose each other in elections and to oppose each other afterward in Parliament.”

With the second and decisive round of elections still to come, the hard-nosed adversarial stance is understandable, and stronger suggestions for a “grand coalition” between the two parties will come later. But the enmity between the two camps will be difficult to overcome.

In the meantime, the third-place party, the Smallholders, which won just over 12% of the vote, finds itself heavily courted by both the Democratic Forum and the Free Democrats.

The Smallholders--one of the so-called “historic” prewar parties--fell short of the pre-election betting, which predicted that it would come in with about 18% of the vote, but it will still carry the largest chunk of votes to contribute to any successful coalition in Parliament. At the moment, it is hard to tell which way the party will go.

The Smallholders campaigned on a single issue: the return of lands nationalized by Communist land reform after 1947. Despite a distinct coolness toward the idea by the Free Democrats, the Smallholders have already had “fruitful” discussions about joining a post-election alliance with the Free Democrats.

“We are philosophically closer to the Democratic Forum,” said Istvan Borosz, a vice president of the Smallholders, “but we compete for the same votes. There are many debates in the house right now. Some argue that we would be swallowed by the Democratic Forum and that we would gain more from an alliance with the Free Democrats. On the other hand, our older leaders are close to Joszef Antall and probably favor him right now. So it is a difficult question and it will not be decided easily.”

The relatively weak drawing power of the Smallholders was one surprise of the voting.

Another was the pattern of votes for the Free Democrats, who had been expected to win larger margins in the cities (where voters were expected to respond to their more “sophisticated” appeal) and do less well in the countryside.

Instead, the Free Democrat candidates led in only 20 of 32 constituencies in Budapest, with the Democratic Forum leading in the others. None of these representatives won anywhere near the 50% level required for outright election, and so the face-off for all of them will occur in the election’s second round.

Some analysts attributed the Democratic Forum’s surge in the cities to a response to ethnic unrest in Romania last week, in which the Hungarian ethnic minority found itself in street battles with Romanian nationalists in the city of Tirgu Mures. The Democratic Forum, following its nationalistic impulses, put itself in the forefront of protests in support of the Hungarians in Transylvania.

In Sopron, a town in western Hungary, Imre Pozsgay, one of the Communist Party’s leading reformers and a candidate of the Socialist Party, ran in third place, behind Democratic Forum and Fidesz (Young Democrats) candidates. Pozsgay won 17.9% of the vote, assuring him a place in the runoff, which he will almost certainly lose. Given the complications of the Hungarian electoral system, however, he is assured of a seat in Parliament, from his party’s allotment of seats for either the county or national lists.

Whatever happens, Pozsgay will be in the opposition with his other fellow former Communists. Which, beyond agreement on the complexity of the election rules, is the second certainty of the election process here: The former Communists, however liberal, will remain in the opposition, no matter who forms the government.