MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (news agencies) — Uruguay’s leftist opposition candidate, Yamandú Orsi, became the country’s new president in a tight runoff Sunday, ousting the conservative governing coalition and making the South American nation the latest to rebuke the incumbent party in a year of landmark elections worldwide.
Even as the vote count continued, Álvaro Delgado, the presidential candidate for the center-right ruling coalition, conceded defeat to his challenger while surrounded by sullen-looking family members and colleagues.
“The country of liberty, equality and fraternity has triumphed once again,” Orsi said to sprawling crowds of supporters that waved flags and shouted their support. “I will be the president who calls for national dialogue again and again, who builds a more integrated society and country.”
As initial exit polls began showing Orsi, 57, a working-class former history teacher and two-time mayor from Uruguay’s Broad Front coalition, holding a lead over Delgado, cheers rang out across Montevideo’s beaches.
Delgado told supporters gathered at his own party’s headquarters in the capital of Montevideo that he had lost. The crowd was hushed.
“With sadness, but without guilt, we can congratulate the winner,” he told them. “But it’s one thing to lose the elections and another to be defeated. We are not defeated,” he added, generating a burst of applause.
A political heir to former President José “Pepe” Mujica, an ex-Marxist guerilla who became a global icon for transforming Uruguay into one of the most liberal and environmentally sustainable nations in the region, Orsi rode to power on promises of safe change and nostalgia for his left-wing party’s redistributive social policies.
He struck a conciliatory tone, vowing to unite the nation of 3.4 million people after such a tight vote.
“Let’s understand that there is another part of our country who have different feelings today,” he said, as fireworks erupted over his stage overlooking the city’s waterfront. “These people will also have to help build a better country. We need them too.”
With nearly all the votes counted, electoral officials reported that Orsi won 49.8% of the vote, ahead of Delgado’s 45.9%, a clear call after weeks in which the opponents appeared tied in polls.
The rest cast blank votes or abstained in defiance of Uruguay’s enforced compulsory voting. Turnout in the nation with 2.7 million eligible voters reached almost 90%.
Analysts say that the candidates’ lackluster campaigns failed to entice apathetic young people and generated unusual levels of voter indecision.
But with the rivals in broad consensus over key issues, the level-headed election was also emblematic of Uruguay’s strong and stable democracy, free of the anti-establishment fury that has vaulted populist outsiders to power elsewhere, like the United States and neighboring Argentina.
Orsi’s win ushers in a return of the Broad Front that governed for 15 consecutive years until the 2019 election of center-right President Luis Lacalle Pou.
“I called Yamandú Orsi to congratulate him as President-elect of our country and to put myself at his service and begin the transition as soon as I deem it appropriate,” Lacalle Pou wrote on social media platform X.
The opposition’s upset was the latest sign that simmering discontent over post-pandemic economic malaise favors anti-incumbent candidates. In the many elections that took place during 2024, voters frustrated with the status quo have punished ruling parties from the U.S. and Britain to South Korea and Japan.
But unlike elsewhere in the world, Orsi is a moderate with no plans for dramatic change. He largely agrees with his opponent on driving down the childhood poverty rate, now at a staggering 25%, and containing an upsurge in organized crime that has shaken the nation long considered among Latin America’s safest.
Orsi is also likely to scupper a trade agreement with China that Lacalle Pou pursued to the chagrin of Mercosur, an alliance of South American nations promoting regional commerce.
Despite Orsi’s promise to lead a “new left” in Uruguay, his platform resembles the mix of market-friendly policies and welfare programs initiated under President Mujica and other Broad Front leaders.
From 2005-2020, the coalition presided over a period of robust economic growth and pioneering social reforms that won widespread international acclaim, including the legalization of abortion, same-sex marriage and sale of marijuana.
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