Former Communist Swept Into Romania’s Presidency : Elections: Iliescu wins 86% of vote. Protesters say the balloting was rigged. They attack two officials of the victorious party.

Ion Iliescu, former Communist Party stalwart who fell out with dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the 1970s, emerged with a whopping 86% of the presidential vote after ballots were counted Tuesday from Romania’s much-maligned attempt at a democratic election.

The landslide victory for Iliescu and the National Salvation Front that he heads illustrates both the party’s popularity and the risk it runs of restoring one-party rule in a nation that threw off communism in a bloody revolt five months ago.

In what may be a preview of the volatile days ahead for the winners, two senior officials of the front-controlled government were attacked in University Square on Tuesday evening when they attempted to talk with anti-Communist protesters who have occupied the central intersection for a month.

With nearly all of the ballots counted from Sunday’s vote, Iliescu had 86%, followed by Liberal Party candidate Radu Campeanu with about 10% and Ion Ratiu of the National Peasants Party with less than 4%.

Front candidates had 67% in the race for Senate seats and 68% in the run for the lower house, the Assembly of Deputies, according to the National Election Bureau.

“We did not expect such a solid victory,” Iliescu said in an interview carried on Bucharest Radio.

Silviu Brucan, one of the front’s campaign organizers, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the front’s share of the vote is too high and “this is no good for democracy because I stick to my statement that a strong opposition is essential in a democracy, particularly at a time when that democracy is in the making.”

The son of a railroad worker who rose to membership in the powerful Communist Party Central Committee, Iliescu was demoted and stripped of party responsibilities in 1971, reportedly because Ceausescu branded him a freethinker with dangerous ideas about democracy.

Front opponents, however, have accused him of harboring neo-Communist ideas and of seeking to slow the transition to the Western-style economy sought by most of Romania’s 23 million citizens.

He has called for reforming Romania’s economy along the lines of European social democracies and has mentioned Sweden as an example of the system he will pursue.

Iliescu said during the brief interviews aired Tuesday that he would support any calls for investigation into the “irregularities” reported during the first multi-party election in more than 50 years. International election observers said the vote was flawed by incidents of ballot box-stuffing and voter intimidation.

The complaints failed to persuade foreign observers that the 60-year-old Iliescu, who has led Romania since Ceausescu’s ouster and execution last December, lacks the overwhelming endorsement of the people.

The second-place finisher in both Senate and Assembly contests was the Hungarian Democratic Union, with about 7.4% of the vote, a surprisingly strong show of nationalist identity by the 2 million ethnic Hungarians in Romania. The largest minority in the country, they were often repressed under Ceausescu.

The front refrained from declaring victory Tuesday as the slow vote tabulation was still under way. But the outcome giving the front control of both houses of Parliament as well as the presidency was obvious soon after the counting began early Monday.

Constantin Tugui of the Dacia polling institute told Romanian media that his organization had conducted an exit poll and determined the exact results reported by the National Election Bureau.

The crowd of anti-Communist demonstrators at University Square, which had shrunk in recent days, surged to at least 2,000 Tuesday, many of them angered by what they saw as a rigged election.

The demonstrators, mostly students, contend that the front is trying to restore the authoritarian rule its members enjoyed as Communists. The front, which has 1 million members nationwide, groups together some former party officials as well as former dissidents and revolutionary figures.

Justice Minister Teofil Pop and Sever Georgescu, an aide to Prime Minister Petre Roman, arrived at the square with the aim of negotiating an end to a hunger strike by 24 students and to the noisy protest that has blocked traffic through the intersection since April 22.

Witnesses said the students initially spoke calmly with the officials, but that the surrounding crowd began shouting, “Thieves! You stole the revolution!”

Georgescu was roughed up, and one man attempted to choke him before he broke free and ran away. Pop was protected by the circle of hunger strikers.