Keith B. Richburg, Jakarta – Some 38 days after Indonesians voted in the country's first free election in a generation, the final tabulation of the results was announced Thursday, and they confirmed what political analysts and others here long suspected – the party of opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri finished first in the crowded field.

Mrs. Megawati's party got 33.7 percent of the vote, with the once-dominant Golkar party of President B.J. Habibie in a distant second place with 22.4 percent, election officials said.

The completion of the tabulation means Indonesia's evolving democracy now shifts to the next stage of this complex and drawn-out drama – the complex process of forming a National Assembly and choosing Indonesia's next president.

Mrs. Megawati's People's Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, won about 35 million votes, with about 23 million votes for Golkar. About 14 percent of the 122 million votes cast were considered invalid.

The election was for 468 seats in a 500-member Parliament, the core of an expanded assembly whose main task is to choose Indonesia's next president. Final allocations of parliamentary seats still cannot be determined, but the seat count is likely to be closer than the election results because the system is weighted to give more seats to Indonesia's outer islands, where Golkar ran stronger.

While this was not a direct election for president, the two major competing parties – PDI-P and Golkar – were largely identified with their leaders, Mrs. Megawati and Mr. Habibie, with the first offering herself as a clean break from the corrupt and discredited past, and the latter relying on his advantages of incumbency and his links to Islamic organizations.

The results were compiled on Thursday night by the Indonesian National Elections Committee, but must still be validated by all 48 parties that contested the June 7 polls, and then confirmed by the General Elections Commission sometime next week.

While long-awaited, the final result did not appear to change the ongoing political dynamic, but was likely to add new momentum to the political bargaining that had until now been taking place largely behind the scenes.

With PDI-P firmly in the lead, Mrs. Megawati is considered in the best position to be elected president when the larger, 700-member Electoral College convenes later this year. Although her party's 34 percent showing leaves her far short of a majority – and even that may get further diluted when the larger assembly, with its appointed members, is formed – by coming in first in a democratic election Mrs. Megawati can claim popularity no one can match.

But she still needs to find other parties willing to support her presidential bid, and to stave off attempts by Golkar and other rivals to form an alternative coalition that could block her path.