New Dominican president

Save for the risky political debts incurred by their candidate, voters in the Dominican Republic who backed Leonel Fernandez Reyna for president are right to be jubilant.

A candidate of the centrist Dominican Liberation Party, the president-elect made promises much like those of his rival, Jose Francisco Pena Gomez of the once leftist but now likewise centrist Dominican Revolutionary Party. Both parties pledged to root out corruption and poverty.

This consensus is not surprising since both parties at different times were led by Juan Bosch, whose anti-imperialist jeremiads once caused shudders in Washington. Bosch, now 87, has sponsored the rise of Fernandez, who favors market economics and speaks affectionately about his ties with New York, where most Dominican immigrants, legal and illegal, have chosen to live.

After Fernandez lost the first round, the old president formed a pact with Bosch, his lifelong foe, to defeat a front-runner whom both bitterly opposed. Advertising by Balaguer's supporters claimed that Pena Gomez was not a Dominican but a Haitian who planned to unite the two countries.

The Balaguer machine not only assured Fernandez his winning majority but can exert powerful legislative leverage, since the president-elect's party won a single seat in the Senate and only 12 out of 120 in the lower house.

-- The New York Times