Citizens in Greece, Hungary, Peru and the Yugoslavian republic of Slovenia went to the polls Sunday - some for the first time.
-GREECE: In the country's third parliamentary elections in 10 months, the conservative New Democratic party won 150 of Parliament's 300 seats, falling one seat short of the majority needed to govern alone.Leader of the centrist DIANA party, Costis Stefanopoulos, said he would support the conservative New Democracy party in Parliament after meeting its leader, Constantine Mitsotakis.
"DIANA will support a New Democracy government in Parliament," he told reporters. That gives New Democracy a 151 absolute majority in the 300-seat Parliament.
New Democrat leader Mitsotakis says he'll nevertheless try to form a government. Lacking an outright majority, however, it was not clear if he would have to turn to a smaller party or an independent in his bid to become premier.
A victory by the New Democrats, who fell just short of a majority in inconclusive June and November elections, would end a debilitating political deadlock that has left Greece unable to cope with a crumbling economy and growing urban terrorism.
The conservatives last held power in 1981, when they lost in a landslide to the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) of former Premier Andreas Papandreou. Both PASOK and the conservatives have governed Greece since the military dictatorship ended in 1974.
-HUNGARY: In balloting that ended four decades of communist rule, the conservative and nationalistic Democratic Forum won a resounding victory over its liberal rival but fell short of a majority.
The Democratic Forum began negotiations to form a center-right coalition government Monday in the wake of its victory in Hungary's first democratic elections in four decades.
Forum President Jozsef Antall said the decisiveness of Sunday's balloting was a clear mandate for a return to the "well-balanced politics of the center," the kind of government Hungary enjoyed before the communist takeover in 1947.
Unofficial results show the party to have won 165 of 386 seats at stake in Sunday's runoff and first-round balloting two weeks ago. The liberal League of Free Democrats collected 92 seats.
The agrarian Smallholders took 43 seats and the Christian Democrats won 21. The two parties are considered likely coalition partners, largely sharing the Democratic Forum's emphasis on family and Hungarian tradition.
It is the second victory for a conservative party in free elections in the former Soviet bloc. Conservatives won big in East Germany's March 18 vote, falling just short of a majority. In both countries, the remnants of the long-ruling communists were relegated to a relatively minor opposition role.
The Socialist Party, comprised of communist reformers who nearly two years ago initiated the democratic changes in Hungary, won 33 seats.
-PERU: Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa won the most votes for president but a politically independent agronomist, Alberto Fujimori, surged ahead of other candidates and forced a runoff.
Unofficial returns show Vargas Llosa, an champion of free market reforms and economic shock therapy, leading with 33.9 percent of the vote - far short of the 50 percent required to avoid a runoff.
Soldiers protected polling stations in the economically troubled Andean nation, but guerrillas of the 10-year-old leftist Shining Path staged attacks. Dynamite was hurled at several polling stations, but no injuries were reported.
Fujimori, the 51-year-old son of Japanese immigrants, garnered 29 percent of the vote. Luis Alva Castro of the center-left governing Aprista Party won just 16.4 percent. A few weeks ago, he held a solid second in the polls.
Independent pollsters give Fujimori a better-than-even chance of defeating Vargas Llosa in the second round of voting, expected in late May or early June.
-YUGOSLAVIA: The liberal republic of Slovenia held Yugoslavia's first free multiparty elections since 1945, with the presidential candidate who favored a cautious approach to secession winning the most votes.
But former communist Milan Kucan did not gain an absolute majority and faces an April 22 runoff vote with Joze Pucnik, a former political prisoner who advocates quick Slovenian independence from Yugoslavia.
Early returns from Sunday's balloting indicated the Slovenian Communists, who recently followed an East European trend and renamed themselves, would be the largest single party in the republic's Parliament but would face a tough five-party conservative coalition led by Pucnik.
The former communists have broken with the national Communist Party leadership because it has resisted democratic reform.
Slovenians have shown an increased desire to secede from the loose and ethnically diverse Yugoslav federation because they are unhappy with resistance to reform in much of the rest of the country, especially Serbia.
Serbia, the largest Yugoslav republic, is a bastion of centralized control where the leaders demand continued Communist Party dominance.