Romanians vote Sunday in their first free elections in more than 50 years after a violent campaign that polarized and politicized this former hard-line Communist country.
The elections have drawn about 500 foreign observers and the attention of a world eager to see whether Romania is truly on the road to democracy. Government officials promised that it would be a clean election.Some feared Romania's history of election fraud and intimidation would be repeated, including protesters who have held a four-week demonstration against the interim government and blocked the city's main thoroughfare.
But others said the secret balloting for president and a two-chamber Parliament will be fair.
"The world is watching and that has a cooling effect on those with hot heads, and it gives a powerful push for those people who want tolerance and fair elections," said one observer, Jim King, senior vice president of Northeastern University in Boston.
Gen. Corneliu Diamandescu, first deputy interior minister, told the daily Tineretul Liber Saturday that 40,000 police and army troops would be deployed at polling centers to "prevent or neutralize manifestations of disorder, acts of hooliganism, violence or rumors which could provoke panic."
Ballot counting was to start on Monday, and the first results were not expected until Tuesday.
State-run television devoted its entire evening news program Saturday to coverage of the election and promises by officials that they would be fair.
A government statement exhorted the more than 16 million eligible voters to turn out for the first democratic election since 1937.
One American observer, Professor Radu Florescu, read a statement on TV by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., promising that the United States would restore Romania's most-favored-nation trading status if the elections were clean.
Romania lost the preferential status in 1988 because of human rights abuses by the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, who was toppled in December's popular revolution and executed.
The latest opinion poll, published Saturday, gave interim President Ion Iliescu and his National Salvation Front, which took power during the revolution, an overwhelming 70 percent of the vote in the three-way presidential race.
Radu Campeanu of the National Liberal Party had 11 percent, followed by Ion Ratiu of the National Peasants Party with 7 percent.
The nationwide poll of 2,250 people was conducted May 11 to 18 by what the state Rompres news agency described as the non-government and apolitical organization Dacia.
The Front, a loose grouping of former Communists, workers and technocrats, says it favors a gradual move toward a free market economy to avoid high unemployment. The Liberals and Peasants, backed by young people and intellectuals, favor a more rapid move to Western-style capitalist economy.
Seventy parties across the political spectrum fielded candidates for Parliament, but only half a dozen had a chance of winning seats.
Romania was the only East European country to break violently with its Communist past, and its election campaign has been marred by violence. Several opposition party workers were reported killed, and Ratiu and Campeanu narrowly escaped being mobbed and lynched.
Opposition parties have accused the Iliescu government of maintaining control over radio, television and newsprint, thereby denying them unrestricted access to the voters.
King said he believed the government had not done enough to stop harassment and intimidation. He said he had seen policemen stand and watch as people were beaten at rallies.
"The Romanian society is not a tolerant society," said King, one of 60 observers sponsored by the U.S. Democratic and Republican parties. "It has no history of democracy, and it relies in many key areas on the government to set the tone and the direction for conduct."
Campaigning officially ended Thursday night, and as of Saturday night no further violence had been reported.
Only the anti-Communist demonstrators in central Bucharest's University Square ignored the ban on political campaigning, repeatedly denouncing Iliescu and the Front as neo-Communists.
Many of the 700 protesters in the square on Saturday said they feared the elections will be rigged.
"They will fiddle with the votes in the computers, and we are scared of the outcome," said Beatrice Andrei, 23, who has spent 20 days sleeping in the tent-camp in the square.
The government Saturday night appealed to the demonstrators to leave the main thoroughfare they have blocked for 28 days to allow traffic through during voting hours.
Protest leader Dumitru Dinca said Friday the demonstrators would remain until Romania has a democratic government untainted by links to Ceausescu.