Romania’s Offspring of Oppression Vote Today : Eastern Europe: Violence, intimidation and rumor marked a turbulent campaign.

Battered by a turbulent election campaign that has deepened Romania’s image of darkness and distrust, voters go to the polls today in a ballot that will test whether the offspring of oppression can learn democracy.

So far, in the first multi-party election in 53 years, the answer appears to be negative.

Violence, intimidation and rumor have been employed as the tools of persuasion in a campaign that wound up this weekend amid clashes of thunder and lightning, intensifying an atmosphere of suspense and posing a backdrop out of the tales of Transylvania.

“No one denies that the campaign has been flawed. The question is to what degree that affects the outcome,” said Ken Wollack, executive vice president of the National Democratic Institute in Washington.

He is one of more than 250 international observers in Romania to oversee the voting and guard against irregularities. Some voters have expressed fear that former Communists and remnants of the hated Securitate secret police force will try to disrupt the voting.

“When you have a country that has been repressed for so long, it is difficult to have a normal electoral process,” said Wollack, whose institute and its Republican counterpart have been monitoring the Romanian campaign since it began early this year.

There have been no candidate rallies for the past two days, as prescribed by the complicated election law drafted by Romania’s interim Parliament.

But the final days leading up to the vote have afforded no pause for quiet reflection. A noisy demonstration by opponents of the National Salvation Front and interim President Ion Iliescu continued day and night despite the ban on political assembly. And fresh outbreaks of unrest have been reported from Timisoara, birthplace of last December’s revolution that ousted dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and from Salaj, in western Romania, where National Peasants Party President Corneliu Coposu was attacked by a band of rock-throwing Gypsies late Friday.

The front is widely favored to win the presidency by virtue of Iliescu’s popularity, and its role as the interim governing force has given it the best chance of gaining the largest share of parliamentary seats as well.

But worries about the ideological leanings of the front have intensified in recent days, drawing more mainstream support to the anti-Iliescu demonstration that has blocked University Square since April 22.

Iliescu was forced to apologize for denouncing the protesters as “hooligans,” and his recent comments on the economy have worried those Romanians who favor a radical switch to market forces.

During a debate with his two top rivals for the presidency that was broadcast on national television late Thursday, Iliescu appeared to advocate a more measured approach to reform.

“We’ve had enough of communism, whether it has a human face or not,” said Anda Minza, a 35-year-old nuclear power plant worker who took up arms against Ceausescu’s forces last December. She was among the several thousand violating the election ban on public assemblies, although most contended that the rally was non-political and therefore legal.

“I watched my son do his homework with gloves on in our apartment where it was 9 degrees (48 Fahrenheit) inside last December,” said Minza, choking back tears and gesturing toward her 12-year-old son, Stefan. “Many people are changing their views of the front because they fear it is a neo-Communist organization.”

At the University Square protestthat blocks one of Bucharest’s central traffic arteries, students, revolutionaries and poets rant about the neo-Communist threat from a corner balcony festooned with banners denouncing Iliescu, the front and Soviet influence.

The front-dominated interim government warned earlier that the square would have to be forcibly cleared to conform to the election law prohibiting political gatherings during the two days before the elections. But, faced with a choice of putting up with the protest or provoking what could turn into a brutal confrontation with the demonstrators, Prime Minister Petre Roman told journalists that “we have opted for tolerating this violation of law.”

The election law also prohibits the sale and consumption of alcohol within three days of the vote, but that regulation, too, has been unevenly enforced. A forest of wine and beer bottles topped the tables in most major restaurants, and senior front figures who met with journalists smelled of whiskey even before nightfall Saturday.

By virtually all accounts, the front is poised to win the presidential election with an outright majority for Iliescu, a former Communist Party secretary who fell out with Ceausescu a decade ago. Even the opposition National Peasants Party concedes that Iliescu is unbeatable, although it attributes his appeal to the results of a front monopoly on media and government resources.

A Bucharest regional Peasants Party leader, Imanoil-Dan Barbaresso, accuses the front of orchestrating the Friday night attack on 74-year-old Corneliu Coposu, the Peasants Party’s national president, as well as widespread defacing of presidential candidate Ion Ratiu’s ubiquitous posters.

A poll by the respected newspaper Romania Libera, which has been critical of the front and its campaign activities, forecast a 61% share of the votes for Iliescu, with National Liberal Party leader Radu Campeanu a distant second with about 17%. Ratiu, a dapper and eccentric millionaire emigre, was predicted to get less than 11%.

Voters will be given two ballots when they enter their polling places, which are to stay open from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m. to give the nation’s 17.8 million voting-age citizens the maximum opportunity to take part. One ballot is for the presidential race, and the other for choosing local candidates for the 119 Senate seats and the 387 seats in the lower house of Parliament.

Full results of the presidential ballot are not expected until Tuesday, and the distribution of parliamentary seats will be known no earlier than Wednesday, the National Election Commission says.

INFAS, a West German polling organization whose sampling of voters during the March 18 East German election proved extremely accurate, plans to make similar forecasts on the Romanian outcome shortly after the polls close. The Bonn-based research firm plans to conduct exit polls at 300 voting places.