BUCHAREST -- Ion Iliescu, a former communist, won Sunday's a runoff for the presidency in Romania with more than 66 per cent of the vote, according to projections issued Monday by the Central Electoral Office in Bucharest.
With 86.24 percent of the vote counted, Iliescu had the support of 66.69 percent of the voters, the Electoral Office said.
The figures from the electoral office represented a crushing defeat for Iliescu's rival, the ultranationalist Corneliu Vadim Tudor.
Tudor had charged Sunday that exit polls predicting Iliescu's victory were "the greatest electoral swindle" and accused Iliescu's Party of Social Democracy (PSDR) of widespread vote-buying.
Tudor had campaigned on law-and-order issues, a strategy that won him in second place in the first round of elections on November 26, just eight percent behind Iliescu. Neither man obtained the required absolute majority.
Tudor, a 51-year-old publisher, had alarmed the country's Jews, Hungarians and Gypsies, with his nationalist rhetoric, which he toned down later in the campaign, focussing on corruption instead.
Iliescu, 70, was the country's first post-communist president from 1990 to 1996.
(DPA)