Uruguay’s presidential election was pushed into a second round of voting on Sunday, as a center-left former mayor finished ahead of the center-right governing coalition’s candidate.
With more than 80 percent of the votes counted, both leading candidates — Yamandú Orsi, a two-time mayor and former history teacher, and Álvaro Delgado, who was the current president’s chief of staff — told crowds of supporters that they expected to face each other in a runoff on Nov. 24.
Exit polls showed Mr. Orsi with 42 percent to 44 percent of the vote, well ahead of Mr. Delgado but short of the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright. Mr. Delgado had 27 percent to 28 percent of the vote, according to polls.
Mr. Orsi represents the center-left Broad Front alliance, which held the presidency from 2005 to 2019. He went into the election as the front-runner, reflecting a desire for a stronger social safety net in one of Latin America’s most expensive countries.
“We are going in for these 27 days,” he told thousands of supporters in Montevideo, the capital, referring to the final campaign push.
Mr. Delgado, a former chief of staff to President Luis Lacalle Pou, has promised to continue the policies of the president, who has an approval rating of about 50 percent, according to surveys. The Constitution bars Mr. Lacalle Pou from seeking a second consecutive term.
“People placed their trust in us,” Mr. Delgado told a gathering of his supporters shortly after midnight on Monday. “Tomorrow we will be meeting to plan the campaign for the runoff.”
Many see Uruguay as a model democracy and a bastion of stability in the region. It is not plagued by the bitter polarization seen in many democracies, and the race was essentially between two moderates whose talking points often overlapped.
Mr. Delgado was joined onstage by another candidate, Andrés Ojeda, who placed a distant third but exceeded many analysts’ expectations. A media-savvy lawyer, he tried to energize apathetic young voters with campaign videos that showed him lifting weights. “The government cannot be won without us,” Mr. Ojeda said.
Electoral officials reported a turnout of 89 percent of the county’s 2.7 million eligible voters. Voting in presidential and congressional elections is compulsory in Uruguay.
The campaign has largely focused on a rise in homicides and robberies, with the governing coalition pushing a tough-on-crime approach and the liberal coalition seeking to boost the state’s role in security matters.
During its 15 years in power, the Broad Front presided over robust economic growth and socially liberal laws that raised Uruguay’s global profile, legalizing abortion, same-sex marriage and marijuana for recreational use. Uruguay has also developed one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.
With Mr. Orsi’s working-class roots, casual wear and promise to eschew many of the benefits enjoyed by heads of state, many voters seemed to endorse a candidate with the same folksy appeal as José “Pepe” Mujica, who was president from 2010 to 2015.
A former guerrilla who is now a chrysanthemum farmer, Mr. Mujica, 89, helped spearhead Uruguay’s transformation into the continent’s most socially liberal country. He is battling esophageal cancer, but he cast his ballot in Montevideo on Sunday.
“We need to support democracy, not because it is perfect, but because humans have not yet invented anything better,” he told journalists.
The campaign has played out without the vitriolic insults and personal attacks seen in many countries, including two of its neighbors, economically dysfunctional Argentina and politically polarized Brazil.
“In a way, Uruguay has been boring, but boring in this sense is very good,” said Juan Cruz Díaz, a political analyst who runs the Cefeidas Group, a consultancy in Buenos Aires. “We’ve seen so many dramatic changes in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and suddenly we face elections in Uruguay in which there is a general consensus, there’s stability.”
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