By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
BUENOS
AIRES -- The mayor of Buenos Aires, Fernando de la Rua, became the favorite
to
replace
Carlos Saul Menem as president of Argentina by winning a landslide victory
Sunday in
a primary election
to carry the banner of the center-left Alianza opposition coalition in
next October's
general election.
The balloting
followed a primary campaign, which inspired little excitement, between
de la Rua, a
cautious politician
running on his record of improving the capital's finances, and Graciela
Fernandez
Meijide, a congresswoman
from Buenos Aires province who promised a full-scale attack against
government corruption.
De la Rua appeared
to benefit from the strength of his Radical Party's political machine and
a
construction
and tourism boom in Buenos Aires that has given the city a new image of
prosperity.
De la Rua declared
victory three hours after the polls closed, pledging "a fight against corruption"
if
he wins the
presidential election. "We want an Argentina with more jobs and more development,"
he
said.
Ms. Fernandez Meijide conceded defeat and pledged to work for her opponent's election.
"I'm not going
to be a hypocrite and deny that I wish I had won," she said, "but this
vote will lead to
a reconstruction
of our country."
Based on early
returns and exit polls, several television news stations projected that
de la Rua would
win more than
55 percent of the vote.
The two candidates
ran a close race in and around Buenos Aires, but de la Rua pulled away
with a
big victory
in the provinces.
A 61-year-old
golf and tango aficionado who has been a government official and politician
his entire
professional
life, de la Rua ran a traditional campaign complete with a trip to Rome
to be
photographed
with Pope John Paul II.
Few political
experts think he would take the country in any dramatic new directions
should he take
power in early
2000.
Sunday, appearing
on television before the polls closed in an ascot and double-breasted blue
blazer,
he projected
a cool confidence, saying, "Like any other Sunday, I'm eating lunch with
my family and
going to Mass."
In televised
debates and other campaign appearances, the two candidates in the primary
election
went out of
their way to minimize policy differences and to emphasize their desire
to stay united to
defeat the governing
party.
They hugged in
public and jointly endorsed the Alianza platform, which pledged to crack
down on
corruption,
take political influence out of the judicial system, and funnel more government
funds into
education, job
training and credits for small business.
The Alianza platform
also promised to double exports, to $50 billion a year by 2003, and to
reduce
the unemployment
rate to 6 percent from the current rate of over 12 percent. But the platform
did
not offer many
specifics on how the goals would be accomplished.
Both candidates
also said that if elected they would not diverge from Menem's major economic
policies --
neither reversing his sweeping privatizations nor his one-to-one peg of
the peso to the
dollar. Those
actions brought Argentina's chronic hyperinflation under control and enticed
a
spectacular
volume of foreign investment over the last eight years.
De la Rua's Radical
Party, traditionally the party of Argentina's middle class, and Ms. Fernandez
Meijide's Frepaso,
a more liberal party that broke away from the ruling Justicialist Party,
cobbled
together a coalition
last year and managed to gain control of the lower house of Congress in
elections
last October.
De la Rua has agreed to choose a member of Frepaso as his vice presidential
running
mate.
The candidacy
of Ms. Fernandez Meijide, a 67-year-old former French teacher who is a
Benny
Goodman fan
and sews her own clothes, received worldwide attention because one of her
three
children was
kidnapped by the security forces during the military dictatorship in 1976
and never seen
again. But while
voters seemed to like her image as an outsider, she was so careful not
to appear
threatening
or too liberal that she stirred little enthusiasm among voters.
On television
Sunday, she appeared as a motherly figure, stirring a pot of risotto in
a cramped
kitchen. "We're
going to work hard to keep the Alianza strong and united through the campaign,"
she
said. "We understand
that the nation needs to make changes."
Recent polls
indicated that each of the coalition's candidates would be comfortably
ahead of
Eduardo Duhalde,
governor of Buenos Aires province, who is favored to win the Justicialist
primary
next April.
The former finance minister, Domingo Cavallo, the architect of Menem's
economic
program, is
running far behind on a third-party ticket, but he may play the role of
the spoiler.
The Justicialist
Party, which still carries the flag of the late President Juan Domingo
Peron and his
wife Eva, remains
the largest and most powerful political force in the country. But the party
is deeply
divided between
Duhalde and Menem, who tried to run for re-election despite a constitutional
ban.
His candidacy
was blocked by party leaders.
Menem is jockeying
to remain leader of the party after he leaves office in early 2000, but
Duhalde is
trying to block
his efforts in party councils and the courts.
Duhalde is doing
his best to distance himself from Menem because of a series of scandals
that has
implicated several
Cabinet members in recent months as well as a persistently high unemployment
rate that many
economists predict will go up in the coming months because of the deepening
recession in
neighboring Brazil.
De la Rua and
Cavallo contend that the nation needs to reject not just Menem but also
his party, an
argument that
polls indicate appears to strike a chord with a large proportion of voters.
A poll published
Sunday in Clarin, Argentina's leading circulation newspaper, indicates
that the three
issues that
most concern Argentine voters are unemployment, corruption and the increase
in reported
crime.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company