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Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Argentina’s opposition candidate Mauricio Macri is set to become Argentina’s next president after vowing to end currency controls and cut export taxes, preliminary results showed.

Macri had 53.5 percent of the votes, while ruling party’s Daniel Scioli had 46.5 percent, according to Argentina’s National Electoral Council. With 60 percent of the ballots counted, there is little chance of Scioli reverting that lead, the council said. About 81 of voters took part in the election that pitted the two-time mayor of Buenos Aires city Macri against Scioli, who has served two-terms as the governor of Buenos Aires province.

President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner will hand over power on Dec. 10, ending 12 consecutive years of rule by the Kirchner family. Since taking over from her husband Nestor Kirchner in late 2007, Fernandez has seized pension fund assets and the nation’s largest energy company, while increasing welfare programs and battling U.S. hedge funds over defaulted debt. The incoming president will have to reverse a slump in international reserves and seek a settlement with so-called “vulture funds” who are blocking foreign bond payments, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said.

“The next administration is expected to introduce greater pragmatism into economic policy decision making,” Mauro Roca, a New York-based economist at Goldman Sachs, said in a report. “Both candidates have promised to implement, to different extents, many of the much-needed policy reforms aimed at correcting large macroeconomic imbalances.”

Economy Fix

Scioli won the first round on Oct. 25 with 37 percent to Macri’s 34 percent, with a third candidate, Sergio Massa, garnering 21 percent. His votes will now determine the winner. While not issuing a full endorsement, Massa has said he expects Macri to win and that a majority of his supporters would back the former president of Boca Juniors soccer club.

Scioli stressed the economic achievements of the past decade when he voted today and said the “undecided are rethinking their vote.”

“We are going to vote with an unemployment rate of under 6 percent, with the lowest debt level in the world,” he told journalists.

Macri focused on the outlook for change.

“We hope that tomorrow a new stage will start for Argentina,” he said. “We all know this is an historic day that will change our lives.”

In a televised debate last week, neither candidate admitted to the need for austerity measures aimed at reducing inflation and fixing a fiscal deficit estimated to reach 7.2 percent of gross domestic product this year. The new president will also have to lure back investment dollars which have stayed away due to currency controls and resolve a decade-long dispute with so-called holdouts from a 2001 debt default.

If he has won, Macri will govern with a minority in both houses of Congress, although he is bolstered by the surprise capture of Buenos Aires province in last month’s election.

Record High

Markets have reacted to a likely Macri win, cushioned by the knowledge that a Scioli victory would also be an improvement on the status quo.

The Merval benchmark stock market in Buenos Aires is at a record high, average dollar bond yields are at their lowest in eight years, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. indexes, and Morgan Stanley is advising soybean producers to sell their stock now in anticipation of a post-electoral glut when farmers may empty silo bags. The farmers have been hoarding grains on anticipation of lower export taxes and a possible devaluation.

Economic growth may slow next year to 1.1 percent from 1.7 percent in 2015 while inflation could quicken to as much as 30.6 percent from 24 percent this year, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs.

“Next year’s economic prospects remain largely uncertain,” Goldman’s Roca said. “The sooner the implementation of the necessary policy reforms, the faster would be the materialization of the expected medium-term potential.”

( Updates preliminary results in second paragraph. )