Ex-rebels eye 2003 presidency

 BY GLENN GARVIN

 SAN SALVADOR -- A startlingly low turnout in Sunday's elections shook up this
 country's politics hard, leaving the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation
 Front -- which just two days ago looked like it was on the verge of breaking apart
 -- as El Salvador's most potent electoral force.

 The FMLN not only won a plurality of seats in the Congress for the first time, but
 took control of the mayors' offices in most of the country's largest cities, including
 a near-landslide victory here in the capital.

 ``Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,'' said a chastened Luis Cardenal, the
 right-wing ARENA party's losing candidate in the San Salvador mayor's race.
 ``Today we lost big.''

 With 88 percent of the ballots counted, the FMLN had only a few hundred more
 votes than ARENA in the contest for 84 congressional seats. But because of the
 complex and somewhat strange formula by which the seats are awarded, the
 FMLN jumped from 27 to 31, while ARENA stayed at 29.

 FMLN leaders, many of whom were Marxist guerrillas crawling around on the
 rugged slopes of the country's volcanoes just eight years ago, bragged that their
 victory makes the party the overwhelming favorite to win outright control of El
 Salvador in the 2003 presidential election.

 ``The FMLN is going to remain united in its municipal work and its legislative
 agenda,'' said Ileana Rogel, the party's communications director. ``We're already
 planning for a victorious campaign in 2003.''

 DEFEAT FOR ARENA

 But another top FMLN official, 1999's losing presidential candidate Facundo
 Guardado, may have been closer to the truth when he portrayed the results as
 less a victory for the FMLN than a defeat for ARENA.

 ``The voters have said to ARENA, we're going to punish you,'' Guardado said.

 Certainly Sunday's results didn't seem to indicate any fundamental shift to the left
 by Salvadoran voters. Two smaller right wing parties -- the National Party of
 Conciliation and the National Action Party -- actually posted a bigger gain than
 the FMLN, boosting their number of congressional seats from 11 to 16.

 That gives the right a clear congressional majority of 45 seats, so ARENA
 President Francisco Flores should have no trouble pressing his market-oriented
 legislative program.

 But Sunday's results certainly suggest a growing discontent with ARENA's
 inability to jump-start the Salvadoran economy. After fast growth in the years
 immediately following the 1992 treaty that ended El Salvador's bloody 13-year civil
 war, the economy has stagnated, growing barely 2 percent last year.
 Unemployment and under-employment total around 40 percent, and as many as
 49 percent of Salvadorans are believed to live in poverty.

 The result has been a wave of unrest. In just nine months in office, Flores'
 government has endured 21 strikes or work slowdowns, including a four-month
 strike by public health workers that climaxed last week in street-fighting between
 strikers and police.

 MAJOR FACTOR

 The economic disillusionment with ARENA was undoubtedly a major factor in
 Sunday's low turnout. Just 38 percent of the country's three million eligible voters
 went to the polls, a number that shocked even election officials who were warning
 of widespread apathy.

 ``That's the most worrisome statistic of the whole election,'' said Julio Hernandez,
 a member of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. ``That does not bode well for the
 next presidential election.''

 Most political analysts here agreed that many of the stay-at-home voters were
 from ARENA. Preelection surveys showed the party with an edge of nearly seven
 percentage points over the FMLN.

 ``A lot of the ARENA support was very soft,'' said Rodolfo Cardenal, vice rector of
 the University of Central America, whose Institute of Public Opinion did extensive
 polling for this election. ``And those soft voters didn't make it to the polls Sunday.''

 While a wounded ARENA tries to figure out how to lure those voters back, a
 healing FMLN can rest easily for the first time in months. A split between the
 party's old hard-line Marxist guerrillas and its new social democratic political
 activists, which seemed certain last week, now appears unlikely to occur anytime
 soon. As Schafick Handal, leader of the hard-liners, noted Sunday night, there's
 not much to fight about right now: ``We're the top political force in the country.''