By South China Morning Post | Created at 2024-11-24 04:44:50 | Updated at 2024-11-24 07:33:12
2 hours ago
Uruguayans will return to the polls on Sunday for a second round of voting to choose their next president, with the conservative governing party and the left-leaning coalition locked in a close run-off after failing to win an outright majority in last month’s vote.
The election has turned into a hard-fought race between Álvaro Delgado, the incumbent party’s candidate, and Yamandú Orsi from the Broad Front, a coalition of leftist and centre-left parties that governed for 15 years until the 2019 victory of centre-right President Luis Lacalle Pou. It oversaw the legalisation of abortion, same-sex marriage and the sale of marijuana in the small South American nation.
Orsi’s Broad Front took 44 per cent of the vote while Delgado’s National Party won just 27 per cent in the first round of voting on October 27. But the other conservative parties that make up the government coalition – in particular, the Colorado Party – notched 20 per cent of the vote collectively, enough to give Delgado an edge over his challenger this time around.
Congress ended up evenly split in the October vote. Most polls have shown a virtual tie between Delgado and Orsi, with nearly 10 per cent of Uruguayan voters undecided even at this late stage.
Analysts said the candidates’ lacklustre campaigns and consensus on key issues have helped generate extraordinary voter indecision and apathy in an election dominated by discussions about taxes and social spending but largely free of the anti-establishment rage that has vaulted populist outsiders to power elsewhere.
“The question of whether Frente Amplio (the Broad Front) raises taxes is not an existential question, unlike what we saw in the US with Trump and Kamala framing each other as threats to democracy,” said Nicolás Saldías, a Latin America and Caribbean senior analyst for the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit. “That doesn’t exist in Uruguay.”
Both candidates are also appealing to voter angst over a surge in violent crime that has shaken a nation long regarded as one of the region’s most safe and stable.
