There were 90-year-olds carried to the polling booths, lines of fully-veiled women waiting patiently in temperatures topping 42C, rowdy youths, overdressed middle-aged "aunties', all making their way through crowded streets, narrow mountain tracks or down rural lanes alike to cast their votes. There was of course violence too: with 17 dead in bombings and shootings.

Many have cast this election as "historic". They are right to do so. It is the first to be held after a civilian government has served out a full five-year term. If, as seems likely, a new government, elected democratically, takes charge in the coming days, or even after weeks of horse trading, then a big step on Pakistan's rocky road towards stable and durable democratic government will have been taken.

The election has seen a major "third force" emerging — former cricketer Imran Khan's Pakistan Justice Movement (PTI) — to challenge the two established parties, the Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan People's Party, which have alternated in power in the gaps between military rule for four decades. The PTI are trying, and largely succeeding, to do politics differently, minimising the dealmaking and the patronage, and reaching out to a young, more educated, often idealistic electorate that have often not voted before. It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the region — where almost all states are to hold general elections within 15 months — where this is being tried.

The last elections in Pakistan, held in 2008 in the shadow of the death three months previously of Benazir Bhutto, showed how the vibrant, if sometimes irresponsible, Pakistani media could play a positive role. Reporters inside polling booths announced results even before they had been properly communicated to the Electoral Commission. A travesty of democracy in the west — but an effective safeguard against post-poll rigging in Pakistan.

This election the media has been instrumental in a sparky, loud debate which, if slightly hysterical at times, has been broadly devoid of real acrimony. The defining image of the 1999 military coup was of soldiers seizing Pakistan's national public broadcaster PTV. Now the military would find it almost impossible to muzzle the multitude of different satellite channels, even for the few hours it would need to take power. Along with the lack of any public tolerance for such a move, this is one reason the men in khaki have taken a back seat.

Few can remember as much enthusiasm, or even interest, in polls. The elite in Pakistan have traditionally shunned politics, or rather the tedious business of democratic process, and have looked to exploit the system not change it. In wealthy suburbs of Lahore last month, rich 20-somethings, i-phones on the table of plush cafes, were talking about candidates' respective records of governance. A tea seller in a rough neighbourhood said he planned to travel 400 miles across the country to his home village near the Afghan border to vote.

It is the violence that of course dominates the headlines. The Pakistani Taliban pledged they would kill and terrorise enough to make it impossible to hold the polls. Their leaders said 300 suicide bombers would be unleashed.Many have died over the course of the campaign. But the vote, with inevitable chaos, confusion and carnival, went ahead. It showed once again what many overseas often forget: that Pakistan is a country, not a conflict.