Salvador Returns Show No Real Winners : Elections: As counting nears end, President Cristiani’s party fails to capture a majority.

President Alfredo Cristiani’s right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance lost its slim legislative majority in last Sunday’s elections, according to nearly complete returns available Saturday. But the impact of the vote on peace talks with left-wing guerrillas was unclear because the center-left opposition also fell short of controlling the National Assembly.

Although the presidency was not at stake, the election was the first in 11 years of guerrilla war to be contested by forces across this tiny country’s widely polarized political spectrum. As such, it was viewed as a means of breaking a standoff in peace talks mediated by the United Nations since last April.

A week after 1 million Salvadorans cast their ballots during a brief guerrilla truce, the election has produced its own standoff--a close result mired in allegations of voting irregularities.

Cristiani said in an interview Friday night that he is eager to restart peace talks “tomorrow if possible” and will hand a new proposal to U.N. mediator Alvaro de Soto this week. But he expressed concern that a slow vote count was creating a bellicose climate and that fraud charges by leftist parties were “throwing gasoline on the fire.”

The votes are being tallied in separate rooms along a narrow corridor at Hotel El Salvador by election boards of the country’s 14 departments. In each room, delegates of seven parties, armed with calculators and their own versions of the results, crowd around a table to monitor the official count and often to challenge it. By Saturday, three of the 14 departments had announced complete official returns. The final count is expected to take several more days.

The Central Electoral Council’s preliminary, unannounced tally from all departments showed that Cristiani’s party, known as Arena, won 39 of the 84 seats in the new Assembly. Arena leaders, who had euphorically claimed a bare majority of 43 seats in the early count, acknowledged at week’s end that they had fallen short.

The Christian Democratic Party, which lost the government to Arena in 1989, won 26 seats. The Democratic Convergence, a coalition of three democratic socialist parties that received votes from many supporters of the guerrillas, finished third in the nationwide popular vote, apparently displacing the conservative National Conciliation Party as a political force.

Because of a complex formula for dividing the Assembly, the Conciliation Party appeared to have won nine seats to the leftist coalition’s eight--a close finish that prompted most of the fraud charges. The Communist-led National Democratic Union and the right-wing Authentic Christian Movement got one seat each.

That leaves the center-left opposition--the Christian Democrats, the Convergence and the Communists--with 35 seats to Arena’s 39 and could enable the U.S.-backed government to control the Assembly through alliances with like-minded rightists holding the other 10 seats.

Cristiani acknowledged that the vote has given center-left opposition parties “a bigger negotiating weapon” and said he is prepared to try to govern through a consensus with them.

“An Arena majority would actually have weakened Cristiani by unfettering the hard-liners in his party,” said John McAward, who headed a multinational team of election observers from Freedom House. “An opposition with this degree of representation will be required to play a responsible peacemaking role, not a demagogic one. If they can live with the results, it could be a win-win situation, with peace dividends to the country.”

The guerrillas’ Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front had counted on a center-left victory to force government concessions in the peace talks. Guerrilla radio broadcasts claimed that such a victory had been achieved but was being nullified by fraud.

“The opposition triumph will be defended,” one broadcast said. “The Salvadorans have more than just votes in their hands. They have guns.”

The guerrillas ended their three-day election truce on Tuesday by shooting down an army combat helicopter with a surface-to-air missile. And on Friday and Saturday, fighting between rebels and government troops throughout the nation left 41 people dead, including eight soldiers.

Guerrillas continued to sabotage electrical lines, causing prolonged blackouts Saturday in the main cities. The government’s electricity commission said it began electricity rationing after six of its 15 primary lines were knocked out.

Cristiani said the truce had facilitated the voting but was offset by signs of a new rebel offensive.

“We don’t understand which is the real FMLN,” he said. “We expected an attitude from them that would allow (talks) to move more quickly after the election, with more flexibility. But we cannot know their real attitude until we see proof. . . . The missile was not a good signal.”

Guerrilla and opposition leaders said that new peace talks will be impossible while the election results remain confused.

Convergence leaders claimed that irregularities have cost them three Assembly seats. They cited evidence that ballot boxes were illegally opened and tally sheets doctored in several towns to steal votes for the Conciliation party. Leftist demonstrators have staged rallies in protest.