Uruguay’s leftist opposition candidate, Yamandu Orsi, became the nation’s new president in a tight runoff on 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, Alvaro 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 told sprawling crowds of supporters that waved flags and shouted their approval. “I will be the president who calls for national dialogue again and again, who builds a more integrated society and country.”
Photo: AFP
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, 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.”
A political heir to former president Jose “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 percent of the vote, ahead of Delgado’s 45.9 percent, 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 percent.
Analysts said that the candidates’ lackluster campaigns failed to entice apathetic young people and generated unusual levels of voter indecision.
However, 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, such as in the US and Argentina.
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