The opposition candidate Yamandu Orsiof the Frente Amplio, has won in the second round of the elections of Uruguay this Sunday, according to the first projections, and will govern the country between March 1, 2025 and March 1, 2030.
Some 2.7 million citizens of Uruguay voted in the second round of the presidential elections. The polls closed at 7:30 p.m. local time (11:30 p.m. in Spain).
The ruling party, Álvaro Delgado, of the National Party, has already congratulated Orsi on his victorylike the president of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou, who has done it through social networks.
“I called @OrsiYamandu to congratulate him as President-elect of our country and to put myself at his command and begin the transition as soon as he understands it is pertinent,” Lacalle Pou reported on his X social network account.
As occurred in the presidential and parliamentary elections in October, Voting in this instance is mandatory. and whoever did not go to the polls will be fined.
José ‘Pepe’ Mujica’s candidate
Forty years after the first election after the civil-military dictatorship that Uruguay experienced in the period 1973-1985 and twenty years after the first victory of Tabaré Vázquez, the Broad Front will return to the Government in the South American country with the help of a politician who is a member of the sector headed by José ‘Pepe’ Mujicawho was also head of state on two occasions.
A gift of people paid for by his decades as history teacher and a popular management in a ‘hinge’ region between the city and the countryside of Uruguay was the seed from which the former president envisioned that Yamandú’s presidency could sprout.
Son of a seamstress and a farmerYamandú Ramón Antonio Orsi Martínez was born in the capital of the Uruguayan department (province) of Canelones on June 13, 1967, the day the country recorded one of the worst frosts of the century, and he lived his first years “in the countryside” ( as rural areas are usually referred to in Uruguay).
There his father was dedicated to selling grapes to the wineries, but everything changed when he was five years old, when the ‘old man’ was diagnosed with a herniated disc and the family had to move to the city, where they opened a warehouse.
During the dictatorship, attracted by figures like ‘Che’ Guevarabegan to take an interest in politics, much to the chagrin of his parents. After experiencing the ebullience of the democratic reopening of 1985, Orsi began to serve in the ranks of the Frente Amplistas.
Shortly before his affiliation in 1989 to the Popular Participation Movement (MPP), created that year by “Pepe” Mujica and other former guerrillas of the National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros, he had He started a career in International Relations that in a month he changed to become a History professor.
In parallel with working in the warehouse, in his third year of studies in Montevideo he began to teach classes with the impression that he would take down his chair from the teaching platform to stand in a circle alongside them.
“It was a whole new wave (…), we broke with that scheme of the professor up there,” he said in an interview.
After his first marriage, the current winning presidential candidate met Laura Alonsopérez in the 2000s, whom he married and in 2012 he had his twin children Lucía and Victorio.
Secretary of the Municipality of Canelones During the two terms of the Broad Front Marcos Carámbula, in 2015 he was elected to succeed him as mayor, a position he held on several occasions and in which he would have remained until 2025 had it not been for the fact that on March 1, 2024 he resigned to run as a presidential candidate.
Last Wednesday, when closing the electoral campaign in the city of Las Piedras, he outlined the vision of what he would want to do if he came to power.
“Next Sunday we will have to decide between two projects. I am not going to stop at the diagnosis of what is happening to us today, but our project, our idea, our proposals fundamentally pass through the land of certainties, through the certainty project“, a concept that for him means that the country continues to invest to grow.
“I want to be president of Uruguay. I went just for that without thinking about other plans. There is only one and that is what I am going towards. I am going to be a militant all my life and I am always going to participate in political activity,” he declared this Sunday when he went early to vote.