MONTEVIDEO: Center-right candidate Luis Lacalle Pou was closing in on Uruguay’s presidency after elections Sunday, exit polls showed, seemingly set to oust Uruguay’s long-dominant leftist ruling party as the South American country tilts to the right.

The polls showed Lacalle Pou with 49.4% of the vote, a three point lead over Daniel Martinez, an ex-Montevideo mayor and candidate for the leftist ruling Broad Front, which has held power for 15 years.

The margin was considerably closer than the 6-8 percentage point difference in opinion polls had predicted in the run up to Sunday’s runoff.

Thousands of Lacalle Pou’s supporters massed around the headquarters of his conservative National Party in Montevideo were ordered to hold back on celebrations until the official results came through.

Officials at the headquarters of the Broad Front, which has won Uruguay’s last three general and presidential elections, were similarly reserved about conceding defeat.

Official results were expected later Sunday or early Monday.

National Party leader Lacalle Pou, a senator, trailed Martinez in last month’s first round, but a pact with center-right and right-wing parties following simultaneous legislative elections gave him a majority in Congress as well as a significant lead heading into the runoff.

A win for the right would “reflect a trend in the region of voters rejecting the incumbent party over disappointing results,“ said Robert Wood, Latin America specialist with the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Voter turnout

With bright and sunny weather, more than 70% of the country’s 2.6 million eligible voters had cast ballots three hours before the polls were due to close at 7.30pm (6.30am Malaysian Time), Electoral Court chairman Jose Arocena said.

“We want the Front to win, because we feel that with the left our rights are guaranteed,“ said Juan Pablo Abella, 40, as he walked to a polling station in Montevideo’s upmarket Villa Biarritz district with his wife and nine-year-old daughter.

Abella said both he and his wife were born under Uruguay’s dictatorship and for them, voting was both a right and a duty.

“Seeing how things are in the region, not everyone has the possibility to choose. You have to value that,“ he said.

The runoff is effectively a referendum on 15 years of rule by the Broad Front — or Frente Amplio — which has won the last three elections.

“Voters are tired of economic stagnation, high unemployment and rising crime since the end of the commodity supercycle, and will look to Mr Lacalle Pou for improvements,“ Wood told AFP.

Inflation is running at 7.5% and unemployment at 9.0%.

Outgoing president Tabare Vazquez noted turmoil sweeping Latin America — the resignation of Evo Morales as president of Bolivia, and sometimes violent street protests in Chile and now Colombia — and said Uruguay will carry out a smooth transfer of power to a new president in March of next year.

“The people of Uruguay can rest assured that we are going to achieve this,“ Vazquez told reporters.

In a highly unusual incident in the early hours of Sunday, a bus carrying military personnel to guard ballot boxes was stoned by people participating in an electronic music festival in Montevideo.

Uruguyan media and videos circulated on Twitter showed several cars had been damaged.

“When I saw that this morning, I thought it was another country. Unfortunately it was Uruguay,“ said Lacalle Pou, who has promised to get tough on rising crime levels.

Legalised cannabis

The Broad Front, a coalition of leftist movements, can point to a record of progressive governing since it broke a decades-long conservative stranglehold on the government in 2005.

Tiny Uruguay stood out on the international stage by approving abortion and gay marriage, and the small nation pioneered the legalisation of cannabis in 2013.

But Lacalle Pou has tapped into voter concerns over the country’s high tax rates and promised to look elsewhere to raise the US$900 million (RM3.76 billion) needed to reduce the public deficit, nearly 5.0% of GDP.

Uruguay has long been considered a bastion of peace and stability in an often turbulent region.

But public safety has been eroding, with a sharp rise in some violent crimes reported last year.

In 2018, South America’s second-smallest country registered a record 414 murders, up 45% on the year before. — AFP