El Salvador Right Turn

Democracy's verdict can be harsh, even for its friends. Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte's ruling Christian Democratic Party, which has steered an erratic course between murderous foes on the left and the right, rediscovered that truth last week when it was roundly rejected at the ballot box. Almost 1 million Salvadoran voters braved guerrilla intimidation to oust the Christian Democrats from power and give control of the 60-seat Assembly to the ultraconservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which in the past has been associated with right-wing death squads.

"We thought we would lose," said a Duarte adviser afterward, "but we never thought it would be so catastrophic." The President's party won only 35% of the vote and lost 11 of its 33 Assembly seats. ARENA captured 55% of the ballots and 31 seats, up from 13. ARENA also gained at the grass roots, winning mayoralty races in 13 of 14 provincial capitals.

In Washington, U.S. officials tried to put a positive face on the results. Said a senior Administration official: "The ultimate test of democracy is to have the party in power lose an election to the opposition." Congress, which has authorized nearly $3 billion in military and economic aid for El Salvador over the past seven years, may be less sanguine.

ARENA's success is largely the consequence of Duarte's growing record of policy failures. The President, who has another year to serve, took office in 1984, promising to end the war and restore economic health to the country. But today some 40% of the country's workers are unemployed and El Salvador's war against the Marxist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front sputters on, a point that guerrillas underscored by knocking out 80% of the country's electricity supply on election eve. Duarte's popularity in Washington, once a source of strength at home, is ridiculed today by many Salvadorans, who feel that U.S. advice and assistance have brought no solutions to national problems. To make matters worse, the Christian Democrats have been tarred by corruption: one of their Assembly candidates came under pressure to withdraw from the campaign after disclosures that he was suspected of misappropriating as much as $2 million in U.S. funds.

Another factor in ARENA's favor was a leadership change. In 1985 former Army Intelligence Major Roberto d'Aubuisson, linked by Duarte and the U.S. to the death squads, quit as party president under pressure from Washington. But he remains a key figure in ARENA, and he drew large enthusiastic crowds at campaign rallies. D'Aubuisson's successor is Alfredo Cristiani, a graduate of Washington's Georgetown University and scion of a wealthy coffee-growing family. His soft-spoken approach evidently convinced some Salvadorans that the party had moderated its views, and many were further swayed by ARENA's slick advertising campaign, with the slogan "We'll change for the better." Said Cristiani after the vote: "Our goal isn't to be a systematic opposition to President Duarte, but his government has to hear our ideas."

The trouble is that most of those notions are at odds with Duarte's. ARENA has promised, for example, to allow the founding of private banks to compete with El Salvador's state bank and to return to private hands the country's major export industries. There is widespread speculation that ARENA will use its new power in the Assembly to stop investigations of human-rights abuses. Above all, ARENA has vowed to take a tougher approach to defeating El Salvador's guerrillas, going so far as to declare that it may send home some 55 U.S. military advisers who have worked to improve the Salvadoran army's dismal human-rights record.

Whether ARENA can accomplish those results with Duarte still in office is questionable. But pessimists point out that those cheering hardest for ARENA's victory may have included the F.M.L.N. Captured documents purportedly show that the guerrillas view an ARENA majority as helping their cause by increasing El Salvador's already lethal polarization.