Dominican Leadership Race Goes to Runoff

Jose Francisco Pena Gomez, who many Dominicans believe was cheated out of the presidency by vote fraud in 1994, was the top vote-getter Friday in the presidential election, but he fell short of the 50% needed to win outright and avoid a runoff.

With 95% of Thursday’s votes tallied, Pena Gomez had 46%, seven percentage points ahead of his nearest rival, Leonel Fernandez of the Dominican Liberation Party. Vice President Jacinto Peynado of the ruling Social Christian Reformist Party trailed far behind with 15%.

“This is what you call in English a landslide,” an exuberant Pena Gomez said Friday. “Whether on the first or second round, the result is the same: the presidency for the Santo Domingo Accord,” a coalition built around his Dominican Revolutionary Party.

But Fernandez said Pena Gomez’s failure to win a majority in the first round is, in fact, a defeat. Pena Gomez “always bet on a first-round victory. . . . Now he is a victim of his own propaganda,” Fernandez said.

Analysts have expressed doubts that the populist Pena Gomez, 59, can win on the second round with conservatives and business interests united against him. Polls have indicated that while Pena Gomez has a firm base of support, Fernandez, 42, would draw most of the votes from minor parties in the second round.

Pena Gomez dismissed such concerns, noting: “For the [Liberation Party] to win in the second round, it would have to win all of the Reformist votes.”

Fernandez said his party is willing to form a second-round coalition with the Reformist Party, which under 89-year-old President Joaquin Balaguer has ruled the Dominican Republic for 22 of the last 30 years.

“We are open to any sector of the Dominican public that wants to support” the Liberation Party, including the Reformists, Fernandez said.

The runoff election will be June 30, prolonging a campaign that has already wearied many Dominicans.

Balaguer’s fifth reelection two years ago was so rife with fraud that it provoked an international outcry. In response, Balaguer, who is legally blind, agreed not to serve his full four-year term or run in the early elections held this week. In keeping with the lukewarm support that Balaguer has given Peynado, the president did not vote Thursday, according to news reports.