Islamic Fundamentalists Take Lead in Algeria Vote : North Africa: The ruling party trails in the first multi-party balloting since 1962.

Algeria, the feisty revolutionary republic that surprised the world nearly three decades ago by throwing off French colonial rule, opened its first door to democracy Tuesday when voters cast their ballots in the first multi-party election since independence in 1962.

At voting stations ranging from schools in teeming downtown slums to mobile voting trucks to remote Bedouin desert camps, Algerians considered the first official challenge to the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) and prepared to decide the future of one of the most powerful Muslim fundamentalist movements in the Arab world.

Although final results were not available, Interior Minister Mohammed Salah Mohammedi reported early today that the Arab world’s first legalized Islamic party, the Islamic Salvation Front, (FIS) had surged into the lead, leaving the FLN in second place.

Ten new opposition parties fielded candidates against the FLN, the party that presided over Algeria’s bloody battle for independence and subsequent evolution into one of the Middle East’s few bastions of socialism. It launched an egalitarian experiment in open education and free health care that began sinking in recent years with dwindling oil prices and a sluggish state-run economy.

At issue in municipal and provincial elections is not only the future of President Chadli Bendjedid’s political reforms but also how those reforms will stand up against the Salvation Front, the muscular Muslim fundamentalist movement. It is seeking to enlist the hundreds of thousands of unemployed youth who populate the streets of Algiers and other urban centers in a campaign to turn Algeria into a conservative Islamic state.

Affluent Algerians who grew up under the influence of the FLN are alarmed at the growing apparent power of the fundamentalist party, as are governments throughout the Arab world and the Mediterranean. They are looking to the results of balloting in Algeria for an indication of the growing political power of radical Muslims in what has historically been moderate regions of the Middle East.

Abassi Madani, the spiritual leader of the FIS, has predicted that the party will gain 75% of the vote, and at a press conference Monday, he warned that he might not be able to control his followers if there is evidence that the government has rigged the elections.

Political analysts and government officials here say privately that they do not expect the FIS to gain anywhere near 75% of the vote, but even the 30% that many analysts predict could spell trouble for the ruling FLN, which still holds all the seats in the national assembly.

Although Tuesday’s balloting covers only about 1,800 municipalities and provincial councils, many predict that the failure of the FLN to maintain a credible majority of the vote could force the president to dissolve Parliament and schedule national elections much sooner than 1992, when deputies’ present terms expire.

Some political observers here say the FLN’s problem is that the majority of Algerians have been born since the revolution.