Leftist Wins Romanian Presidency in Landslide

Former Communist Ion Iliescu, who now stresses that he is a social democrat, won this country’s presidency in a landslide Sunday over ultranationalist Corneliu Vadim Tudor, exit polls showed.

The victory by Iliescu--who led Romania’s 1989 revolution against the brutal Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, then served as president from 1990 to 1996--completes a sharp lurch to the left in Romanian politics.

Worsening poverty and unkept promises to clean up corruption left the current, center-right government so unpopular that incumbent President Emil Constantinescu, who defeated Iliescu in 1996, chose not to run for reelection rather than face certain defeat.

The exit polls, which have generally proved reliable here, showed Iliescu defeating Tudor 70% to 30%. Official results are expected later in the week.

“We promised [in the campaign] to restore the authority of the state, to eliminate extreme poverty and to accelerate Romania’s integration into the European Union and NATO,” Iliescu, 70, said in a victory speech Sunday night. “As chief of state, I will see that these promises become reality.”

Tudor, in an angry appearance before journalists Sunday evening, declared that Iliescu’s win marked “the victory of atheism” and meant that “Romania will enter the third millennium led by a gang of thieves.” He described the exit poll results as “the biggest fraud in Romania’s 20th century history.”

There seemed little doubt, however, that fear of Tudor’s unpredictability and his threats to use authoritarian methods to clean up corruption had frightened many center-right voters into supporting Iliescu.

Tudor, 51, won 28% of the votes in first-round balloting Nov. 26, when there were 12 candidates, so it appeared that he retained his core support but that voters who had previously backed other candidates generally went for Iliescu on Sunday. In the Romanian system, a runoff is held between the two top finishers if no one wins first-round support from more than half the eligible voters.

“From two bad candidates, we voted for the one we thought would do less harm,” Ioana Alexandrina, 68, a retired accountant, explained after emerging from a polling site here in the capital. “Tudor was always angry and fighting with people. We know Iliescu is devoted to our country. What we don’t like about him is that he’s surrounded by dubious persons. Their goal is to get rich.”

The president has only limited policymaking authority under Romania’s Constitution, but the country’s tradition of strong leadership gives whoever holds the post a key political role. The president is also commander in chief of the armed forces, and some here feared how Tudor might use that power.

Critics charge that Iliescu’s years as president were marked by halfhearted reform and heavy-handed authoritarianism. But even some of those critics say he has learned from his years both in power and in opposition, becoming a more genuine supporter of democracy and market-oriented reforms.

“Now at the end of his career his goal is to be accepted--by democrats, by the people, by Europe and the world--as a democrat,” said Cornel Nistorescu, a longtime Iliescu critic who is editor in chief of Evenimentul Zilei, a leading Romanian newspaper. “He understands that the Iron Curtain has fallen and the future is democracy.”

Candidates associated with the outgoing government fared poorly in parliamentary elections held on the same day as the first-round presidential vote. Iliescu’s Party of Social Democracy picked up 47% of the seats in the lower house of Parliament, with the remainder split between center-right parties and Tudor’s Greater Romania Party. The Party of Social Democracy’s No. 2 figure, Adrian Nastase, is now expected to become prime minister, either as head of a minority social democratic government or in a coalition with one or more of the small center-right parties.

The unexpectedly strong first-round showing by Tudor--accused by his critics of anti-minority bias and dictatorial tendencies--prompted a massive rallying around Iliescu by center-right politicians and prominent journalists.

In his speech Sunday evening, Iliescu praised voters for expressing “solidarity in the face of a threat against democracy, civil rights and freedom.”

“The past two weeks reminded us that what we accomplished in 1989 with much loss of blood must be continuously defended--that the ghosts of the totalitarian regime may reappear any time out of poverty, desperation, frustration, hate and hardship,” Iliescu declared.

A Western diplomat, who said he could speak only anonymously because he was not authorized to make on-the-record comments about the election results, said Iliescu and the incoming government have “the opportunity to improve the economy with the cooperation of the West.”

“There is a lot of skepticism in the West about whether this new government will proceed aggressively with what it needs to do to join the EU and to join NATO,” he said. “But Western governments generally want this new government to succeed.”

Many market-oriented critics of Iliescu and his party fear that the new government will seek to boost social benefits and fight unemployment at the expense of pushing privatization and other painful economic reforms.

But in an interview, Iliescu compared his party’s policies to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression and of European democratic socialist parties after World War II.

“Any economic policy, any reform, cannot have success if it does not have social sustainability, the support of the population,” he said.

Iliescu also argued that despite his role as a high-ranking Communist in the 1960s, his record of breaking with Ceausescu in the early 1970s and then playing a key part in the 1989 revolution provides evidence of his democratic credentials.

While Iliescu’s pledges generally offered reassurance to the center-right opinion leaders and voters who gave him his apparent landslide--and foreign governments and investors worried about his commitment to reforms--some questioned their feasibility.

Iliescu’s party “has promised so many things,” Nistorescu said, “it’s obvious they can’t achieve it all.”