Romania Two Cheers for the Front Runner

By JOHN BORRELL FLORESTI

A single unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling provides the only light in Floresti's dark and musty village hall. The first half a dozen rows are occupied by about 40 farm workers who are listening to a candidate from Romania's National Peasant Party promise the return of all agricultural land that was confiscated by the Communists after World War II.

"We are running for office to eliminate the effects of the dictatorship," the candidate explains. "The land must be given back to you." It is the first time since 1946 that anyone has campaigned for public office in Floresti (pop. 2,000), 340 km northwest of Bucharest, where most of the villagers are employed on a nearby state-owned farming cooperative. But with multiparty elections scheduled for this Sunday and more than 80 political parties in the race, the farm workers are curious about both the process and the promises.

"So who is going to give us our land back, and when?" shouts a burly farm worker. Before anyone can answer, a thin man with a red face rises to denounce Ion Ratiu, the Peasant Party leader and one of three presidential candidates. "He's a capitalist who ought to go back to the West," the man blusters. Retorts another angrily: "Provocateur, who sent you? If you don't like it here, get out before we throw you out!" By now, half the audience is on its feet, and only restraining arms prevent protagonists from coming to blows.

The meeting ends in disarray less than 30 minutes after it started. "It's shameful," says Marian Victor of the Peasant Party. "There were only a few of us present, and we couldn't even communicate." The same could be said of all Romania as it prepares to go to the polls in the first multiparty elections in more than four decades. Presidential candidates representing parties opposed to the ruling National Salvation Front have been shouted down, pelted with eggs and physically threatened.

Much of the bitterness of the campaign stems from questions surrounding the legitimacy of the Salvation Front government and its right to contest the elections. Formed in the aftermath of the overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu last December, the Front is dominated by former Communists. These include Ion Iliescu, the country's interim leader and front runner in the presidential race, who was Ceausescu's heir apparent in 1970 before falling out with the dictator.

The Front said initially that it would not contest the election but quickly reversed that decision, angering those who had seen it as a transitional body. Last month in Timisoara, where the revolution that led to Ceausescu's ouster and execution began on Dec. 17, the Front's opponents called for a ban on former Communists contesting elections for ten years. Protests against the Front have been staged in other cities, including Bucharest, where thousands gather daily to denounce Iliescu and other former Communists.

The Bucharest sit-in has blocked traffic in one of the capital's main thoroughfares and led Iliescu to denounce the protesters as "vagabonds," a description for which he later apologized. Throughout the country, protesters took to wearing lapel badges inscribed I AM A VAGABOND and renewed their demands for Iliescu to step aside.

He has refused to meet any of those demands. Backed by opinion polls that show both the Front and himself ahead in the parliamentary and presidential elections, Iliescu has gone on the stump, drawing large crowds in provincial cities. "Iliescu, Iliescu," they chant when he raises his arms triumphantly and smiles. He offers little in the way of concrete proposals, talking vaguely of capitalism with a human face and of his commitment to pluralism.

The Front's published program resembles that of its main opponents, the Peasant Party, the National Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party. All are in favor of a market economy and pluralism, while differing mainly on the pace and scope of reforms. "We would break with the past more quickly than the Front," says Mircea Vaida, a top official of the Liberal Party in Cluj. Agrees the Front's Badau Wittenbergen: "We want reforms but with proper guarantees against unemployment. It is not possible for us simply to copy Western ways."

Such caveats, opponents claim, bolster the contention that the Front is a neo-Communist Party anxious to retain much of the old order. "Iliescu is just like Gorbachev," charges Iuleu Boila of the Peasant Party. "He is interested in perestroika rather than real change."

Nonetheless, with the resources of the state behind it and with a large following of peasants and workers, the National Salvation Front seems increasingly confident of a sweeping victory in this weekend's elections. Not even the opposition parties seriously deny that likelihood, although they have hopes that Iliescu will be forced into a runoff for the presidency by failing to win more than 50% of the vote in the first round. It seems a faint hope -- perhaps as faint as the long-term prospects for Western-style democracy in Romania.