Report
Uruguay returns to the left in the wake of Pepe Mujica
The Uruguayan versions of Milei and Bolsonaro, such as the Partido Colorado or Cabildo Abierto candidates, did not gain much support and did not make it to the runoff.
Yamandú Orsi, the candidate of the leftist Frente Amplio (Broad Front) coalition, won the runoff on Sunday, November 24, and was elected president of Uruguay. Orsi got 49.8 percent (1,196,798 votes), beating center-right candidate Álvaro Delgado, who got 45.9 percent (1,101,296 votes). Voting is mandatory in Uruguay and turnout was, as usual, very high: 89.4 percent.
Delgado, the heir apparent of current President Luis Lacalle Pou, supported by the Republican coalition of center-right and right-wing parties, got 445,000 more votes than in the first round that took place on October 27, but failed to close the gap with Orsi, who grew his total by 120,000 votes.
Orsi was previously the governor of the department of Canelones, population 500,000, a miniature Uruguay with an economy dominated by both factories and farming and ranching. His political background was in the Movimiento de Participación Popular of former President Pepe Mujica, and he is considered a pragmatist and a deal-maker. The son of an agricultural worker and a seamstress, he has an Italian surname and a Charrúa name, the pre-Hispanic indigenous culture of present-day Uruguay. He has worked as a history teacher in schools in his department and in the inland areas of the country, and is the first president not to have been born in the capital.
With this background, he succeeded in convincing the majority of his fellow citizens to give him their vote, but not in bridging the gap between the capital and the inland areas. Majorities in Montevideo and its neighboring departments chose Orsi, while in the interior of the country – with sparsely populated areas dominated by agriculture – Delgado won.
From March 1, 2025, the day of his inauguration, the new president will have to address the growing insecurity in the country – mostly due to the rise of drug trafficking – and revive a stagnant economy, where GDP is not growing (just 1 percent last year), but prices, inequality and poverty all are.
For his five-year term, Orsi will be able to count on an absolute majority in the Senate, obtained in the first round, while in the Chamber of Representatives he is two representatives short from an outright majority. But those from the Frente Amplio say they are confident in Orsi's negotiating skills. He has promised “the revolution of simple things,” meaning no sudden swerves for a country accustomed to stability and alternation in power, unusual for Latin America, which is often shaken by political and economic earthquakes.
Orsi gave assurances that he will govern for everyone, not just those who voted for him, while the leaders of the defeated coalition quickly conceded. With these marks of (increasingly unfashionable) respect for democratic norms, Uruguay is an exception in a region where the political battle is increasingly violent. The Uruguayan versions of Milei and Bolsonaro, such as the Partido Colorado or Cabildo Abierto candidates, did not gain much support and did not make it to the runoff.
On Sunday evening, Montevideo's Rambla, which runs along the Rio de la Plata, was packed with people in the section where the Frente Amplio stage was set up.
“Families with children, couples of young people – a people's celebration, with cars lining up until two in the morning. Things we are no longer used to in Italy,” Fabio Porta (PD) told il manifesto, the deputy elected to represent the South American Italian diaspora, who traveled to Montevideo with an international progressive delegation.
“The first Frente Amplio governments – between 2005-2020 – were part of the progressive cycle that governed Latin America. Today, with Trump and Milei, and the left in trouble in Chile and Brazil, the Frente Amplio's victory goes against the trend,” Porta added. ”Furthermore, in Uruguay we are also seeing the emergence of new leadership, the renewal of leadership, something that is not happening among either the Brazilian or Argentine left. This is why, with Sunday's victory, Uruguay has established itself as the standard bearer for the Latin American left.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/luruguay-torna-a-sinistra-sulla-scia-di-mujica on 2024-11-26