Romania remained on the road to EU and NATO membership yesterday. But Sunday's presidential election was more a rejection of hardline nationalism than an endorsement of the former Communist and leftwing leader, Mr Ion Iliescu, for a third term as president.
With 80.7 per cent of the vote counted, Mr Iliescu was leading the hardline nationalist, Mr Corneliu Vadim Tudor, by 66.89 per cent to 33.11 per cent.
Two exit polls forecast that Mr Iliescu, Romania's first elected president from 1990 to 1996, should win with about 70 per cent of the vote. He became president after the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaucescu.
He claimed voters had categorically rejected extremism and totalitarianism.
Mr Tudor had tapped into popular disgust with corruption, threatening "mass executions in stadiums of all the thieves who have robbed the country."
But his threats to force Roma (Gypsies) into ghettos, and verbal swipes at other minorities, aroused concern among voters.
Mr Tudor, who heads the Parti Romania Mare (PRM - Greater Romania Party), refused to concede defeat, claiming that he would appeal to the international tribunal in the Hague.
But the independent organisation Pro-Democratia, which had 5,000 observers stationed across Romania, said it did not detect any fraud.
In Sunday's run-off vote, Mr Iliescu picked up an additional two million votes from his first round when he took 36.3 per cent of the poll, mostly from centre-right voters, according to the IMAS polling firm.
A former senior communist, Mr Iliescu had run a populist campaign in the first round to rally left-wing voters, but later styled himself as a European social democrat to appeal to centrists.
Mr Iliescu immediately tried to allay fears that his Romanian Social Democratic Party's (PDSR) hold on power would mean a slowdown in the country's westward drive.
"We promise we are going to accelerate the process of the dignified integration of Romania into the European Union and NATO," he told hundreds of supporters. "As the head of state I will assure that this promise becomes reality."
With average monthly wages stuck at around $80 (€90), unemployment over 10 per cent and sluggish growth, Romanians are eager for someone to jumpstart the economy.