BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

 SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- Euphoric backers of opposition leader
 Hipolito Mejia spilled onto Santo Domingo streets Wednesday to mark his lead in
 a presidential election that has turned into a cliffhanger.

 With 97 percent of the ballot boxes from Tuesday's election counted, Mejia held
 49.9 percent of the votes and predicted he would end up just a whisker over the
 50 percent he needs to avoid a runoff.

 Danilo Medina of the incumbent Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) was second
 with 24.84 percent, a mere .16 percentage points ahead of Joaquin Balaguer, 93
 and blind but seeking an eighth term in the presidential palace.

 Horn-honking, flag-waving members of Mejia's Dominican Revolutionary Party
 (PRD) cruised Santo Domingo streets even though unexplained delays in the vote
 tally left the official outcome in doubt as of Wednesday evening.

 Rumors swept the city of any number of Mejia-Medina-Balaguer coalition deals in
 the works to either win or avert a June 30 runoff by swapping candidates or
 voluntarily dropping out of the race.

 If a runoff is required, Medina's PLD and Balaguer's Social Christian Reformist
 Party (PRSC) are expected to forge a coalition as they did to help President
 Leonel Fernandez of the PLD defeat a PRD candidate in 1996.

 Mejia's first move Wednesday morning was to visit Balaguer at his Santo
 Domingo home, apparently to seek his blessings for a Mejia government if he
 wins more than 50 percent or his backing if a runoff is needed.

 Mejia, 59, who was born in the town of Guarabo, in the nation's farming heartland,
 studied tobacco management at the University of North Carolina and now runs his
 family's multimillion dollar agro-business.

 Known as El Guapo de Guarabo -- the tough guy from Guarabo -- he has a
 penchant for popular slang that supporters say shows he is an honest and candid
 but which foes say shows that he lacks statesmanship.

 Mejia nevertheless struck a popular chord by attacking Fernandez's free-market
 policies, which generated an unprecedented economic boom that has seen GNP
 grow by some 30 percent since 1996 but has brought few benefits to the many
 poor and farmers in this nation of eight million people.

 He has vowed to halt rampant corruption, renationalize the sugar mills privatized
 by Fernandez, reduce imports that compete with local products, and launch
 public construction projects to benefit the poor and create jobs.

 His party already controls Congress and most local governments, including Santo
 Domingo's, giving him virtually unchallenged power at least until the next
 legislative and local elections in 2002.

 SOME `DISTANCE'

 Mejia, who comes from the moderate side of the center-left PRD, has also said
 he would put some ``distance'' in the Dominican Republic's warm relations with
 both the United States and Cuba.

 Fernandez established full diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1998 after a 39-year
 break, visited Havana three times in four years and awarded Cuban President
 Fidel Castro this nation's highest medal.

 The New York-educated Fernandez also warmed ties with Washington, winning
 increased U.S. aid and stepping up the extradition of Dominicans wanted by U.S.
 justice, long opposed by nationalists.

 Mejia served as minister of agriculture under the PRD government of President
 Antonio Guzman from 1978 to 1992, and was his party's vice presidential
 candidate in 1996, but has never held elected office.

 Married and the father of two sons and two daughters, all grown, he took time
 Wednesday to visit the grave of longtime PRD leader Jose Francisco Peña
 Gomez, who died from cancer in 1998.

 NO FRAUD CLAIMS

 Police reported two men were killed in political quarrels during the balloting
 Tuesday, but the traditional post-election allegations of vote fraud were absent
 despite the closeness of the ballot.

 Balaguer's apparent third-place finish seemed like the last political gasp of a man
 who first entered politics when Herbert Hoover occupied the White House and
 ruled this nation for 22 of the last 34 years.

 ``Some of the younger PRSC members backed Balaguer this year only because
 they wanted to keep the party together long enough to inherit it,'' a Western
 diplomat said.

 ``This would weaken Balaguer a lot,'' acknowledged historian and former
 ambassador to the United States Bernardo Vega. ``But I have said that so many
 times before . . . and he has stayed there.''