Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez arrives Panama City, Panama, in March. Fernandez's party was declared the winner of last week's legislative polls. - REUTERS
SANTO DOMINGO (Reuters):
DOMINICAN PRESIDENT Leonel Fernan-dez has emerged triumphant from last week's legislative election after his centrist party won undisputed control over both houses of Congress, final results showed.
The May 16 election was orderly but its aftermath was marred by violence that took at least 10 lives, as well as by a slow vote count and charges of fraud.
International observers and foreign ambassadors said they had seen no proof of any vote-rigging, however. Former Presi-dent Hipolito Mejia, a leader of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution, also ruled out electoral fraud in remarks to reporters yesterday.
With all the ballots counted, the national electoral council said late on Wednesday that Fernandez's Dominican Liber-ation Party (PLD) was victorious in local elections in 22 of the Dominican Republic's 32 regional provinces.
With that, the PLD won 22 of the 32 seats in the Senate and between 90 and 95 of the 178 seats in the House.
The result marked a dramatic boost for the PLD which had just one Senate seat and 43 representatives in the House before the election, and also for Fernandez, who was president from 1996-2000 and re-elected in 2004.
OUT OF RECESSION
Fernandez, 52, has managed to pull the country out of a recession triggered by the fraud-induced collapse in 2003 of a major bank, Baninter.
He has struggled until now, though, to persuade Congress to approve economic measures to meet the government's budget obligations under a loan programme from the International Monetary Fund and others required by a free trade agreement with the United States and Central America.
