The left returns to power in Uruguay: Yamandú Orsi will be the new president

The left returns to power in Uruguay: Yamandú Orsi,candidate of Broad Front (FA)won the presidential election to the ruling party candidate, Alvaro Delgado.

“I called Yamandú Orsi to congratulate him as president-elect of our country and put myself at your command,” the current president wrote on social networks, Luis Lacalle Pou.

“Starting tomorrow we are going to work hard every day for a Uruguay where no one feels relegated,” promised Orsi, 57, a history teacher and former mayor of the Department of Canelones, on the Uruguayan coast.

After 94 percent of the votes were counted, the leader of The Uruguayan left won by 49.66 to 46.06 percent in the second roundwhich faced the two candidates with the most votes in the first round on October 27.

The Frente Amplio, which governed for three consecutive terms between 2005 and 2020, thus returns to the government of one of the most stable and moderate democracies in Latin America. A democracy without extremes or polarization, to the point that the current president called Orsi to congratulate him when there were still no official results, but only projections from pollsters.

“There is another part of our people that today has a different feeling, we also need them,” said Orsi in reference to the voters of the five-party coalition led by Lacalle Pou.

“There is no future if we put a wall on ideas”added the man who will assume the presidency on March 1, and who takes over from the left-wing presidencies of the late Tabaré Vázquez (2005-2010 and 2015-2020) and José “Pepe” Mújica (2015-2020).

Lacalle Pou will leave the government with a level of popularity close to 50 percentbut the Uruguayan Constitution prevents him from seeking re-election in consecutive terms. Local analysts believe that if he had run, he would have won the election, since Delgado, who was his general secretary of the presidency, was a candidate with little charisma.

The return of the left to the Executive Tower, the headquarters of the Uruguayan presidency, impacts the political map of Latin America, where the Argentine Javier Mileyultraliberal-conservative, is in a clear minority against left-wing governments in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Chile, among other countries.

Milei maintained a good relationship with Lacalle Pou. Although he never accepted his counterpart’s invitation to visit Uruguay, Milei gave Lacalle Pou something that Uruguayans had been asking for for years: dredging 14 meters deep of the access channel to the port of Montevideo, on the Río de la Silver, essential for Uruguayan foreign trade.

It is presumed that Milei does not have a good relationship with Orsi, since the Frente Amplio is a coalition that includes the Communist Party. The Argentine president, politically allergic to the left, does not speak with the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and exchanged insults with the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, although he did shake the hand, smiling, of the Chinese head of state, Xi Jinping.