t wasn’t that the results were ever in dispute, though it did take a curiously long time for them to materialize; rather, the takeaway was, like so many things in Argentina throughout the past eight years, a question of how one chose to read the controversial incumbent President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, into the results.

The candidate Kirchner endorsed, Daniel Scioli, the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, was the front-runner, with the most to lose. “The governors are with me, the Presidents of the regions are with me, the mayors are with me, and the legislators are with me,” he told the press beforehand. He entered Sunday with an air of inevitability surrounding his candidacy, but if he failed to gain forty-five per cent of the vote, or if his opponents drew within ten per cent of his total, he would have to face a runoff on November 22nd. Almost no one predicted it, but that is exactly what happened. Scioli won Sunday’s election by a very narrow margin—taking slightly more than thirty-six per cent of the vote—and, as a result, he limps into the second round of voting looking jilted and precarious.

Scioli didn’t do himself any favors on election night. When, about two hours before the results were announced, he began attacking his principal rival, the conservative mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, he seemed to be giving a premature concession speech. Without using the word balotaje, or runoff, he began his campaign for it by rattling off Kirchner’s signal accomplishments (welfare expansion, the nationalization of an oil company) and saying that none of that would have been possible under Macri. “Argentines don’t want to go back to the economic adjustments, devaluations, and indebtedness,” he said, dredging up the catchwords of past conservative administrations. A vote for Macri, he claimed, would return the country to the nineteen-nineties, when corruption and misguided economics led to one of the largest sovereign defaults in history.

For Macri, an unrepentant conservative in a country run by an iconic left-wing populist, the bar was low: he only had to make the contest close for the night to seem to go his way. “What happened today changes the politics of this country,” he declared, on securing just thirty-four per cent of the vote. (The gubernatorial candidates on his ticket also won in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Jujuy, in the country’s north.) He’s since received an unexpected boost from the third-place finisher, Sergio Massa, Kirchner’s disgruntled former Cabinet chief, who had twenty-one per cent of the electorate behind him. Massa and Scioli belong to the same broad-based ideological movement, known as Peronism, but Massa has suggested that he might throw his support to the Macri camp. On Monday, amid speculation about what that could mean for the runoff, Scioli announced that he’d debate Macri on November 15th. With Macri gaining momentum, Scioli will try to reposition himself—not just in terms of his rival but also, crucially, in relation to Kirchner herself.

From the start of the campaign, Scioli has had to walk a fine line where Kirchner is concerned. “Continuity with some change, that’s what people want,” Maria Victoria Murillo, a political scientist at Columbia University, told me. On the one hand, Scioli has portrayed himself as a successor to Kirchner, who, while divisive, enjoys a broad base of support in the middle-class electorate. On the other, he needs to create distance because the economy is bottoming out—G.D.P. is down, inflation has soared, exports have sunk, and unemployment is up—and the public has grown restive. As the journalist Carlos Pagni put it,  “The prosperity that always accompanied Kirchnerism has ended.”

Scioli has claimed that he’s for “gradualism” and moderation, at once an exponent of continuity and change. A case in point is his posture on a group of creditors who have taken Argentina to court over the repayment of old bonds in default. The hedge funds which these investors represent are known as “vultures,” for buying up distressed debt and suing for the full value of the assets. Kirchner has been sparring with them for years, refusing to pay the more than a hundred billion dollars they claim is due, and turning the battle into a populist cause célèbre. While global commodity prices were high, Kirchner could afford to be shut out of capital markets—part of the collateral damage of her hard line on the issue—but the circumstances have changed; it’s likely her successor will have to strike some sort of deal. Scioli, for his part, has sounded as bellicose as Kirchner when asked about the vultures in public. But, off the record, his advisers have said that the candidate understands he’ll have to negotiate. “Kirchnerism is over,” one Scioli adviser reportedly said. “Soon enough, they’ll realize.”

One of the ironies of Scioli’s situation is that he’s always had a fraught relationship with Kirchner. Some of the bad blood goes back to the administration of her late husband and predecessor, Nestor. Scioli was Nestor Kirchner’s running mate in 2003, a holdover from some of the deals Kirchner had to cut in order to round up support for his Presidential bid. Once in office, he seemed to resent Scioli, whom he kept close but never really trusted. Each time Scioli veered from the Kirchner line—say, on a tax measure or some minor matter of policy—he was publicly brought to heel. “What followed were years of petty snubs and various humiliations,” Gabriel Pasquini, the author, with Graciela Mochkofsky, of a book on Kirchner, told me. Scioli endured the situation until the Kirchners nominated him for the governorship of the province of Buenos Aires, in 2007. On the surface, it was a prestigious post, since forty per cent of the country lives in the province, but historically it’s been double-edged for seekers of higher office. “There’s a dictum of sorts that the governor of Buenos Aires province will never become President,” Pasquini said. Rather than a proving ground, the province, because of its size and the scope and complexity of its problems, tends to mire its leaders in controversy and overexposure.

Then there’s the question of Cristina Kirchner’s endorsement, which was only ever half-hearted. Earlier this month, at a joint campaign stop, she said, “I ask all Argentines to get beyond all the antipathies we have and to think about what we’ve done over these years. There has to be continuity.” Some interpreted the word “antipathies” as a reference to Scioli, whom she seemed willing to accept but not embrace for the sake of her legacy. Others claimed she was speaking more generally about the “antipathies” wrought by her back-to-back administrations. Whatever the case, Kirchner loyalists have been less ambiguous about their misgivings about Scioli. Last week, the leader of one influential group of Kirchnerist intellectuals said that he’d be voting for Scioli, but only with a “long face.” Needless to say, this poses problems for a candidate pitching himself as Kirchner’s anointed successor. “Will the President even let herself be summoned in the form of her candidate?” Pagni asked, practically rhetorically, in La Nación.

Scioli’s careering prospects going into next month’s runoff highlight Kirchner’s weaknesses, but not for the reasons that most people think. The conventional wisdom is that, if Kirchner’s candidate falters, it signals the end of her own clout. That decline has long been in motion, the result of a dwindling economy and the mere passage of time: after twelve years in power, including two terms in office, she cannot run again for the Presidency until 2019. Some analysts maintain that her objectives going into these elections were Machiavellian from the start: that she intended to hand over the Presidency to a successor who would come into office with a limited mandate with which to face an increasingly intractable economy. This does not seem unlikely after Sunday, and it could conceivably strengthen Kirchner’s hand if she ever wanted to return to office. (And a Macri win, after all, might not be the worst thing for her.) Still, her bastions of support within the Peronist party will have to adjust to life without her, whether or not she plans to run again in four years.

The real mark of Kirchner’s weakness, though, may be that she never really had a proper successor in the first place. It’s hard, even now, to define what Kirchnerism is, exactly. After the past eight years, it looks to be a mélange of populism, elements of genuine progressivism, fierce partisanship, economic nationalism, and political savvy (even if it reads as bluster abroad). Central to a lot of it was the economic boom that funded the policies for which Kirchner is most beloved. And yet these years have been marked by unremittingly severe domestic crises. The battle lines were drawn within months of Kirchner taking office, when she levied a new tax on agricultural exports that prompted national strikes and road blockages; before long, she was embroiled in an ugly and protracted fight with the media conglomerate Clarín. From the start of her first term, there were repeated calls for her resignation, and they never really went away. “People see what they want to see with Kirchner,” Murillo said.

Through it all, there were two people who kept Kirchnerism afloat as a rhetorical armature, political posture, and topsy-turvy set of policies: the Kirchners themselves. Their original plan appeared to be trading off Presidential terms to prolong their time in office. Then, in 2010, Nestor Kirchner died of a heart attack, and just like that the equation diminished. The year before, he and his wife had made a pitch for a new leftist coalition, to broaden their base of support, but it never materialized. In 2011, Kirchner handpicked a Vice-President, possibly with an eye toward grooming a successor, but he was almost immediately named in a corruption scandal and spent the rest of their term in the shadows. Settling on Scioli was something of a defeat for Kirchner, because he was the only candidate who could be both nominally loyal to her and win an election. You’d think a caudillo never has to compromise, but you’d be wrong.