BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

 SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- Two rivals in an inconclusive
 presidential election withdrew Thursday, assuring a victory for Hipolito Mejia and
 sparking a promise that he will first tackle a crisis that has left Dominican homes
 without electricity and water for up to 12 hours a day.

 ``We are without lights or water. We can't live like that,'' said Milagros Ortiz
 Bosch, Mejia's vice presidential candidate on the center-left Dominican
 Revolutionary Party (PRD) ticket.

 Mejia will also move quickly to aid farmers hard hit by outgoing President Leonel
 Fernandez's open-market policies, she added, and look into allegations that he is
 leaving behind huge debts to local contractors.

 His government also plans to promote free-zone assembly plants along the border
 with Haiti, hoping to ease that country's grinding poverty and slow illegal
 immigration, Ortiz Bosch said in an interview.

 An estimated 500,000 Haitians live illegally in this nation of eight million people,
 sneaking easily across the 193-mile land border to work in the Dominican sugar
 cane and construction industries.

 An elated Ortiz Bosch spoke as PRD members celebrated announcements by
 Mejia's top rivals in the Tuesday balloting that they would not force a run-off even if
 final tallies show one is required.

 Another 45 days of campaigning would be ``a tortuous road that would generate
 enormous problems'' for the nation, said Danilo Medina, who finished second, as
 he withdrew from the race.

 A spokesman for Joaquin Balaguer, in third place despite his 93 years of age and
 virtual blindness, said the seven-term former president would also surrender any
 chance of making it into the runoff.

 VOTE TOTALS

 With all but nine of the 11,422 polling places counted, Mejia had 49.87 percent of
 the votes, twice Medina's 24.94 percent but short of the 50 percent required by
 law to avoid a runoff. Balaguer had 24.60 percent.

 Even a coalition of Medina's centrist Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) and
 Balaguer's conservative Social Christian Reformist Party (PRSC) would find it
 impossible to defeat Mejia in a second round, PLD officials conceded.

 ``And Balaguer told us he would have no control over his party's members in a
 second round, so it would have been suicide,'' said Reynaldo Pared, PLD
 delegate on the Central Electoral Junta.

 ``They don't want to be the Polish cavalry charging at German Panzers in World
 War II,'' added one Western diplomat. ``They prefer to focus right now on who will
 be the lead opposition party in the next four years.''

 ANGRY SUPPORTERS

 Angry PLD activists shouted ``traitors'' and ``sell-outs'' as Medina announced his
 withdrawal after a series of lengthy meetings with outgoing President Leonel
 Fernandez and other party leaders.

 ``We fought for two years shoulder to shoulder with Danilo and Leonel, and now
 they throw in the towel,'' shouted a tearful Juana Sanchez, member of the PLD's
 ruling Political Committee.

 But Ortiz Bosch called the withdrawals ``the most sensible'' solution to the
 election's cliff-hanger ending.

 Mejia, a 59-year-old agronomist whose party last held the presidency from 1982
 to 1984, spent Thursday visiting several political foes to mend fences and seek
 their support for his four-year term.

 He also met for one hour with Ambassador Charles Manatt of the United States,
 the country's largest trade partner and home to some one million Dominicans who
 last year sent $2.4 billion in cash remittances to relatives.
 In another indication of his ties to the United States, Mejia got campaign help
 from supporters in South Florida.

 Sergio Pino, one of South Florida's largest home builders, returned Thursday from
 three days in Santo Domingo after helping to raise money for the candidate. One
 fund raiser was held last month in the Miami office of his company, Century
 Builders Group.

 Pino, a major fund raiser for Gov. Jeb Bush and presidential candidate George W.
 Bush, said he got involved in similar efforts for Mejia through friends in Santo
 Domingo.

 ``My friends thought he had a good chance of winning,'' Pino said Thursday.

 Pino said he helped raise about $50,000 in Santo Domingo. ``For Santo Domingo,
 it's a lot of money,'' he said.

 Back in Miami, Pino raised another $22,000. The Cuban American National
 Foundation held another fund raiser, he said, but he was not sure how much it
 raised.

 TACKLING PROBLEMS

 Ortiz Bosch said Mejia's first task would be to tackle the energy crisis,
 compounded by Fernandez's botched privatization of generating plants, that has
 been causing daily blackouts that forced many families to install
 gasoline-powered generators at home.

 He will also try to limit food imports, which soared from $320 million to $1.2 billion
 under Fernandez's free-market policies and undercut local producers, Ortiz Bosch
 added.

 Mejia has also promised to boost tourism, now the country's single largest source
 of hard currency, and a Free Zone sector where 500 foreign firms run in-bond
 factories and employ 50,000 workers.

 Mejia campaigned on a broad promise to reverse or temper many of Fernandez's
 free-market policies, credited with fueling a four-year boom that saw the economy
 grow by more than 7 percent per year, tops in Latin America, but criticized for
 generating few benefits to the poor.

 ``Our government will be working to achieve economic development, which is not
 the same as economic growth,'' said Ortiz Bosch.

 Herald business writer Barbara De Lollis contributed to this report.