People wave flags of different political parties in the streets of Montevideo on Sunday, ahead of the Oct. 26 general election.MIGUEL ROJO/AFP / Getty Images
For years, Daniela Leal saw only one good choice at the ballot box: She voted for the Frente Amplio, the Broad Front, the coalition of Uruguayan leftist parties that prioritized the well-being of families like hers. Ms. Leal, 43, her four children and one grandchild live in a cement-block house with a corrugated tin roof in a slum on the edge of the capital. Sewage runs out front in the cracks in the pavement she tries to sweep clean. The Broad Front governments of the past decade boosted minimum wages and pensions, and focused on better housing and health care – they cared about people like her, she said.
But with a national election in Uruguay just around the corner, Ms. Leal is suddenly undecided. The Frente is the party of the poor, but she worries they have become just like all the other politicians. And she wonders if it's time to try something new.
The indecision of voters such as Ms. Leal has made the Oct. 26 election uncharacteristically difficult to predict. Polls suggest the Broad Front may hold on to parliament but will not win another majority. And the race for president is too close to call.
Uruguay's current President, Jose Mujica, is widely admired in the country. A 79-year-old former guerrilla, he spurned the presidential mansion to stay in a tumbledown farmhouse, and donates most of his salary to a public housing scheme. But he is barred by a single-term limit from running again.
The Frente Amplio candidate is Tabare Vazquez, a 74-year-old who was president before Mr. Mujica. His main challenger is Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou, the candidate for the Partido Nacional, or National Party. He is in many ways Mr. Mujica's opposite: He is a lawyer who lives in a posh gated community, went to private school, is bilingual and wears sharp suits. (Mr. Mujica favours battered sandals and stained sweaters.) And at 41, with sandy hair flipping over his collar, Mr. Lacalle Pou looks and sounds like what he is – a full generation younger than Mr. Vazquez.
"Tabare Vazquez finished his first term in office with the highest popularity rating in history, but the perception is he's tired. He's 70 and he's competing with someone who really wants it," said Rosario Queirolo, an expert on public opinion and politics at the Catholic University of Uruguay. "The opposition is doing a great job of capturing dreams. Because Lacalle Pou is young and has surrounded himself with technocrats, with education and economic experts, he is selling himself as pragmatic."
Polls over the past two weeks show Mr. Vazquez with about 40 per cent support, with about 28 per cent for Mr. Lacalle Pou and the third-place candidate far behind at 15 per cent. For a runoff vote, which will be held Nov. 30 if no candidate wins more than 50 per cent, Mr. Vazquez and Mr. Lacalle Pou poll almost even.
Adolfo Garce, a professor of political science with the University of the Republic in Montevideo, said the predominant feeling among voters is a "natural weariness" with the party in power, but that Mr. Lacalle Pou has been clever to run a "gentle and non-confrontational" campaign.
The main issue for voters in this contest is public security. Uruguay has the lowest rates of violent crime in South America, but they have been creeping up, driven mostly by robberies carried out by people addicted to pasta base, a cheap cocaine byproduct. Ms. Leal was mugged last month in mid-afternoon at a bus stop in front of her house; the neighbourhood is so full of strung-out teens that she won't go out after dark, she said.
Even if rates are comparatively low, people are frustrated by the perception of what's been lost. They can't leave their doors unlocked or a bag in the car, said Prof. Queirolo. The opposition is wooing voters with a tough-on-crime agenda of more policing and longer prison sentences.
And while the Frente Amplio can point to significant progress on social indicators – poverty and extreme poverty were both reduced by half in the party's 10 years in power – there is a widespread sense here that Uruguay has not done enough to capitalize on a long period of growth. (The average annual growth rate hovered around 5 per cent for a decade.)
Public infrastructure has not been improved, said economist Javier de Haedo, while the quality of public education has declined. "They didn't save in the years of the fat cows and now the years of the thin cows are coming," he said. "The Partido Nacional will have a more market-oriented team if they are elected, but either of them will adjust. They will have to."
The National Party is centrist and unlikely to make dramatic alterations in social policies, according to Tomas Linn, a senior columnist with the newspaper Busqueda. It won't, for example, repeal high-profile laws that made Uruguay the first country to regulate and provide marijuana sales, the first in the region to legalize abortion, and a pioneer in equal marriage for gays and lesbians.
But the party will likely reduce social spending and cut the deficit, and have a much more adversarial relationship with labour organizations; the Frente Amplio's close ties to unions are considered a key reason why it did not make more dramatic changes in education.
"Things got better in this country, it's true, but there are no opportunities for young people," said Ms. Leal. Three of her four children have blue-collar jobs – the only ones in the neighbourhood with work, she said – but she would like them to do better. "I want a government that talks about youth."