The most effective political campaigns and candidates succeed in telling voters what they already know. Such is the task for the conservative ruling party in El Salvador, which is waging a surprisingly uphill battle against the leftist front that waged a bloody guerrilla war in the 1970s and '80s.

Since 1989, El Salvador has been governed by the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), founded by the rightist cadre that battled the communist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). With U.S. support under President Reagan, a succession of elected governments held off the guerrillas, who were forced to set aside their violent revolution and accept a 1992 U.N.-brokered peace accord that shored up Salvadoran democracy.

Today, ARENA and the FMLN vie for power through elections. Although the FMLN added to its National Assembly seats in Jan. 18 balloting to gain a historic plurality, ARENA and a number of smaller center-right parties will likely keep control of the legislature. Representative democracy and free-market policies have helped the country of seven million people recover from more than a decade of war and economic upheaval. Its economy has recorded two decades of interrupted growth and ranks second (behind Chile) among 34 Latin American states in the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom.

However, El Salvador is not immune from the global economic crisis and high gas prices. Although the country's economy has been transformed, many still live in stubborn poverty and under the threat of gang violence. Any shortcoming is too easily blamed on the party that has run the country since the war.

ARENA has won four successive presidential contests by nominating creative activists barely in their 40s. Its candidate, Rodrigo Avila, is an earnest campaigner, but the polls say he has failed to catch on with middle-class and apathetic voters weary of the ARENA brand. In the past, the FMLN fielded presidential candidates too identified with the armed struggle, Marxism, or both. This year, the Front nominated Mauricio Funes, a well-known television figure and political critic who is a virtual stranger within the FMLN.

Funes rejects socialism and promises respectful relations with the United States. He denies the widely held suspicion that Venezuela's imperialist president, Hugo Chávez, has put $40 million behind the FMLN campaign. Funes hopes that his country's moderate voters will not equate him with the divisive Chávez and his other clients in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador.

Funes knows just what to say. But does it matter what he says? If there were anyone in the FMLN's power structure who shared his vision, why would the Front have to choose an outsider to head its ticket?

If elected, the FMLN could let a neophyte stranger wield real power, or it could do what Nicaragua's Sandinista Front did and marginalize the naive front men who helped them win power.

The FMLN could preserve Salvadoran democracy, or it could revert to the revolutionary, socialist agenda that it has never rejected. The FMLN might seek good relations with the United States, or it could do as every other puppet procured by petrodollars from Caracas and wreck relations with Washington.

The FMLN could keep El Salvador as a bulwark against criminality, or it could put the country on the side of Colombian narcoterrorists with whom the FMLN has been allied for decades.

The FMLN could respect the country's institutions, or it could put the government, courts, security forces and elections at the service of the ruling party, as has occurred in every Latin country that has given power to ideological movements.

The FMLN has accused its critics of preying on the voters' fears by waging a "negative" campaign. If telling the truth about the FMLN, its powerless front man Funes or its sponsor Hugo Chávez is "negative," then that says more about them than about those telling the truth.

Until now, the polls have shown the FMLN winning the presidency easily.

However, the fact that the Front just lost the mayorship in its populace stronghold, San Salvador, may mean that ARENA could deny the FMLN a first-round victory and rally centrist third-party voters in a decisive run-off. That coalition saved representative democracy from a gang of guerrillas in the 1980s and, thanks to these same patriots, Salvadorans get to decide for themselves whom to trust with their future.

Roger F. Noriega is a visiting fellow at AEI. His law and advocacy firm, Tew Cardenas, LLP, represents U.S. and foreign governments and companies.