By IPS Correspondents
MONTEVIDEO, Dec 9 1996 (IPS)

Preliminary results indicate that the most complex and atypical electoral reform in Latin America was given a narrow victory by Uruguay’s voters in Sunday’s referendum.

The final results will not be in until January, according to Electoral Court authorities, because 3.54 percent of the votes — “observed” votes, those not cast in the voter’s corresponding circuit — have yet to be validated.

But everything indicates that the constitutional reform project, backed by the Southern Cone country’s two main parties and opposed by the leftist Broad Front alliance, has squeaked by.

If the current 0.2 percent difference in favour of the reform is maintained as expected after the “observed” votes are validated, the parties will find themselves in the midst of a virtual revolution designed to make their operations and relationship with voters more transparent by establishing that each party will present only one presidential candidate.

Under the current system the parties can present as many as they want, and the most-voted candidate from the most-voted list wins.

The reform would unleash internal strife among the various currents within the parties, even within the left which has traditionally presented a single candidate.

As the results started rolling in on Sunday, the initially comfortable lead of the “yes” vote began to narrow, and the optimism of those who had campaigned for the reform turned into uncertainty and uneasiness. The three to four point difference registered at 23.30 GMT was reduced near midnight (03.00 GMT) to the tiny 0.2 percent difference in favour of the reform, less than 8,000 votes among 1.95 million voters. (Voting is mandatory here).

Political analysts, pollsters and newscasters scrambled to explain that early announcements of victory for the reform project, which had sent party leaders to celebrating, could have been overly hasty.

The latest opinion surveys prior to Sunday’s vote indicated that 21 to 36 percent of voters remained undecided. According to Oscar Bottinelli, director of the polling firm Factum, those were the voters who tipped the scales.

Not since 1971 has any national vote been such a close call. At that time the leader of the National Party, Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, was defeated by Colorado Party candidate Juan Maria Bordaberry, who paved the way for the 1973-1985 military dictatorship.

The main changes that the current reform will apply to the current constitution, which dates back to 1967, are a strengthening of the executive branch and further decentralisation in this country of 3.1 million inhabitants.

The reform will also abolish the law that makes it possible for the parties to present more than one presidential candidate. Each party will be able to present two candidates for the post of governor in the country’s 19 departments.

If the triumph pointed to by the preliminary results is held up by the final count, the new electoral calendar will start off with internal party elections to come up with single presidential candidates, which would be held for the first time in April 1999.

Six months later would come elections for the two-chamber legislature and the first round of voting for the president, in which a winner would require an absolute majority. If no candidate took such a majority, a second round would be held one month later.

In May 2000, elections for governors and legislatures of the 19 departments would take place.

The governing coalition made up of the National and Colorado parties and the minority social democratic New Space movement were the chief advocates of the “yes” vote.

Opposed to the reform was the leftist Broad Front alliance, which in 1994 took nearly one third of the votes, breaking the historic two-party system that pitted Colorados against followers of the National Party.

But Sunday’s results indicate that party discipline or loyalty, previously strong among Uruguayans, has been left by the wayside. As in a previous vote on constitutional reform in 1994, when all the parties were in favour of a proposal that was voted down by the citizens, Sunday’s preliminary results showed that many voters “did their own thing.”

Neither the Broad Front can be sure that in the 1999 general elections it will take the 46.41 percent of voters who came out against the reform, nor the other parties can take for granted that the 50.20 percent who voted in favour of the reform will back them in 1999.

Part of the explanation is that key leaders went against their parties’ public positions — some silently and others loudly advocating their stance.

On Monday, President Julio Sanguinetti and the Colorado Party’s top brass said that those who came out against the reform could be banned from the party for their responsibility in making the apparent victory for the reform so narrow, a party spokesman told IPS.

Leftist leader Tabare Vazquez, the presidential candidate who took the most votes in the 1994 elections, said “we are well- situated for the next elections. In spite of the second round, the way is being paved for a new two-party system: the conservative forces on one side and the progressives on the other.”

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