"Democracy has resisted attempts to restore communism," Nadedzha Mikhailova, president of the conservative Union for Democratic Force (UDF) party told a press conference after the second and final round Sunday in the southeast European, former Soviet bloc country.

Sofia Mayor Stefan Sofiyanski, who was backed by both the opposition UDF and Prime Minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg's centre-right National Simeon II Movement party, won re-election in the capital.

Mayoral posts were being decided Sunday in 1,532 cities and villages in a crucial mid-term vote for the government ahead of legislative elections in 2005.

A high level of abstention showed Bulgarians' disenchantment with former child king Saxe-Coburg's record in office and with the political process in general.

The elections come just over 800 days after Saxe-Coburg, who returned in 2001 after 55 years in exile, swept to power with promises to improve the living standard of Bulgarians, but people are frustrated by his failure to fight poverty and crime.

Sofiyanski took 53.6 percent of the vote in winning a third term, against 46.7 percent for the former communists' candidate Stoyan Alexandrov, according to official results with 76 percent of ballots counted.

Alexandrov, who was finance minister from 1993-94 and who is currently head of a branch of the Japanese bank Tokuda, had presented himself as a business executive but the UDF urged voting against him "to prevent a return of the communists."

The former communists lost power in 1997 after taking the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

The right-wing parties also kept control of Bulgaria's second-largest city, Plovdiv, in the south, where outgoing mayor Ivan Chomakov took 52 percent of the vote, according to Gallup, MBMD and three other polling institute projections.

The former communists in the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) were less overwhelming in the second round Sunday than they were in the first on October 26, when they won four of the six major cities.

This time, with 21 major cities being decided, the right took 11 cities and the former communists eight, with results in two cities being still too close to call.

For the right, the UDF took nine cities while Saxe-Coburg's party took two.

Abstention was again high, with turnout barely reaching 39 percent.

A record percentage of Bulgaria's 6.9 million voters had also stayed away from the polls in the first round.

The disciplined BSP took 33 percent of the first round vote. The UDF was next with 21 percent while the prime minister's party polled only 10 percent, as did his coalition partner the Turkish minority Movement for Rights and Freedoms party.

Political analyst Boriana Dimitrova had warned against reading too much significance into the communists' electoral successes in the first round.

"There is no landslide for the left," she said, since the number of people voting for the BSP was the same as in legislative elections in 2001.

"The votes show that no party dominates," political analyst Antoni Todorov said Sunday, as small parties had in the first round received some 30 percent of the vote.

"The largest party in Bulgaria is made up of the people who do not vote," analyst Petar Emil Mitev said.