Even if in Sunday’s Uruguayan general elections the Broad Front presidential candidate José Mujica polled a higher percentage of the votes than President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner here nearly two years ago, he must wait another month before completing the succession within Uruguay’s centre-left ruling party — one of the world’s most demanding electoral systems (stipulating an absolute majority of the entire electorate for first-round victory) condemns him to a November 29 runoff against ex-president Luis Lacalle of the National (Blanco) Party. This clash could hardly be more polarized between two men united only by generation (totalling 142 years between them) — Mujica is a former Tupamaro guerrilla while Lacalle was the most neo-conservative president (1990-5) of a neo-conservative decade. And yet Uruguay (much like Argentina’s major neighbours Brazil and Chile) is assured of a broad continuity in its political life, no matter what the outcome.

On Sunday Mujica assured everything short of final victory since his 48 percent exceeded the combined total of the traditional Blanco and Colorado parties — moreover he surpassed his best opinion poll forecasts by a few percent while Lacalle undershot his. The undecided seem to have shared their votes between Mujica and the Colorado candidate Pedro Bordaberry (son of a controversial ex-president currently under house arrest for paving the way for the 1973-85 military dictatorship) — the latter was the objective loser of Sunday’s election but also a big winner as the Colorados almost doubled their miserable 2004 vote of 10 percent. Nevertheless, Mujica failed to repeat the 2004 first-round victory of outgoing Broad Front (Socialist) President Tabaré Vázquez and this failure owes less to any shortcomings on the part of Vázquez (whose popularity stands at 60 percent) than to doubts about an ex-guerrilla whose personality and ideology are almost more anarchistic than socialist.

That these doubts are unlikely to prove decisive owes much to the institutional and civic strength of a country where around 90 percent voted on Sunday and the probable anointment of an ex-guerrilla without jeopardizing that institutional structure will in turn only reinforce that strength. The main reason to trust Mujica is that he could never be a one-man show but will have to govern within the limits of a solid ruling party, leaving economic policy to his running-mate Danilo Astori, the real architect of recent Uruguayan growth. This lesson of neutralizing personality politics could profitably cross the estuary to this country where one-man (and one-woman) shows proliferate in government and opposition ranks alike.