EL PARAISO, EL SALVADOR — Like a prizefighter nearing the ring, Mauricio Funes strides through a gantlet of feverish fans.
Booming speakers blare an old left-wing political anthem while a fluttering canopy of red campaign banners lends a celebratory air to this sweltering farm town.
It is an intoxicating moment for Funes, a presidential candidate, and his flag-waving backers from the Salvadoran left. In what would be an improbable turn, Funes could be the next leader of this famously conservative country.
The 48-year-old television journalist, a newcomer to politics, has jolted El Salvador by grabbing a sizable early lead in the race as the candidate of the leftist group that fought a guerrilla war in the country two decades ago.
A victory for Funes would represent a historic breakthrough for his party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, and for a nation where memories of the war still burn.
Funes, who was a journalist during the war, hopes to position himself as leader of a postwar generation by reaching out to about 350,000 young Salvadorans who are eligible to vote for the first time. Many were not born when FMLN fighters battled troops in the hills around places such as El Paraiso, which housed a key army base in the north. He also has been buoyed by discontent over rising food and gasoline costs, and over the right-wing government's decision seven years ago to adopt the U.S. dollar as the country's currency.
The election is nine months away, an eon in campaign terms. But various polls show Funes running solidly ahead of the Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, which has ruled the nation of 7 million since 1989.
A big reason is that voters are in a foul mood over El Salvador's deepening economic woes and alarming violence, much of it by street gangs. More than 14,000 people have been killed during the four-year term of President Tony Saca of Arena.
"I want to see change. That's the key point -- change," said Fanny Beatriz Romero, a 34-year-old merchant who said she used to vote for Arena.
A Funes triumph would add El Salvador, which has been a fervent U.S. ally, to the swelling roster of Latin American nations that have elected leftist presidents.
Funes, a former talk-show host who wears stylish glasses and short-cropped, graying hair, is a political outsider and a newcomer to the FMLN. He is admired by many Salvadorans for his tough questions and for sharply criticizing the Arena government on his daily public affairs program, "The Interview."
