( Spanish) – Shuffle and give again. The presidential race in Uruguay left nine candidates on the road in the first round and only two remain in the race for the Executive Tower: Yamandú Orsi, from the center-left Frente Amplio, and Álvaro Delgado, from the center-right National Party. Uruguayans will witness just under one more month of campaigning before electing their next president on November 24.
The two standing candidates are already beginning to forge alliances. And both Orsi and Delgado seek to convince voters not only that their option is the best, but, above all, that their party will be capable of ensuring greater governability with a Parliament that was divided after the October 27 elections. .
When only the observed votes remain to be counted, the primary results give the Frente Amplio the absolute majority in the Senate (16 senators out of 30) and also 48 of the 99 seats in the House of Representatives. There is more division there, with the presence of several small parties and without an absolute majority of any block.
“I think we have many more advantages for speed in the urgent measures that the country needs, because we have those majorities assured in the Senate,” Orsi said in an interview with Telemundo on Tuesday. “The people gave us a message: no one has a majority (…) Today no one has a parliamentary majority because that implies having a majority in both chambers,” Álvaro Delgado retorted the next day, in the same newscast.
Orsi said that negotiation has always been “his preaching and his practice,” that during his term as mayor of Canelones he achieved agreements, although he had the majorities, and that this makes him the best option to govern: “The main thing is that my campaign is not going to be against the National Party or the Colorado Party, but in favor of a project for the country. It is something that differentiates us, because they defined that it is against the Broad Front.”
Delgado, for his part, said that he believes it is necessary to reach agreements with the other parties, including the Frente Amplio: “Not only reach agreements, but the management of some issues does not necessarily be with members of the coalition. Because if we reach agreements we think of much more logic… neither Peñarol nor Nacional: Uruguay.”
According to political analysts, there are two perspectives to see the photo of the electoral pole position: on the one hand, that the opposition Orsi starts one step ahead, having been the individual party with the most votes in the first round (44%) and having achieved the absolute majority of the Senate. On the other hand, the four parties that make up the current government coalition added more votes in total than the Frente Amplio. Therefore, if these citizens vote again for the parties that now support Álvaro Delgado, he would have the majority in the runoff.
Ignacio Zuasnabar, director of the consulting firm Equipos, told the publication Busqueda that there is a kind of “tie.” He added that “both have elements to show positive results from what happened on Sunday. “If one looks at a longer perspective, obviously we are still in a country where there are two blocks with similar weight.” “This election is going to be defined by microsegments, that is, very small segments of voters,” added Zuasnabar.
Delgado believes he is capable of retaining the voters of the different parties that made up the official coalition led by President Luis Lacalle Pou (National Party, Colorado Party, Independent Party and Cabildo Abierto), and also of adding voters from the small parties that had less than 1% of the votes each. For this reason, he said that he is confident of winning by a “wider” difference than what his sector achieved in 2019. He stated that he does not believe that there is a “leakage” of votes towards the opposition, that the coalition that governed the last five years “has arrived to stay” and that voters “will silently choose the path of continuity.”
Orsi, on the other hand, hopes that what has already happened in other runoffs will happen: that his party will grow in the votes obtained. “Historically, in the second round the Frente Amplio candidates usually collect a significant percentage” of votes that they did not obtain in the first round. He added that in the second round “partisanship takes second place” and that “it is very difficult” for candidates to “automatically herd voters.”
In any case, both will have to face a divided House of Representatives, in which the Sovereign Identity party, led by lawyer Gustavo Salle, obtained two key deputies to achieve any majority. Salle is a politician who defines himself as anti-system and anti-vaccine. He announced that he would vote “annulled,” and declared regarding his entry into Parliament: “We are entering the cave of country-sellers.”
From now on, both campaigns carry out a round of interviews in the mass media, they plan to travel the country from end to end again, seeking direct contact with voters so common in Uruguayan politics, and they organize their work teams. .
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