Yamandú Orsi became the third left-wing president in the history of Uruguay this Sunday and will succeed Luis Lacalle Pou, from the conservative National Party, on March 1, 2025. 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 Frente Amplio will return to the Government in the South American country at the hands of a politician who is a member of the sector headed by José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, who was also head of state on two occasions.
The candidate of the Frente Amplioi, Yamandú Orsi, became the future president of Uruguay this Sunday, after defeating the official candidate, Álvaro Delgado, of the National Party, by just over 90,000 votes, with 98% of the electoral circuits counted, according to data provided by the Electoral Court.
“Let us understand that there is another part of our people who, like us a while ago, today have a different feeling. These people will also have to help us build a better country, we need them too. The message cannot be other than that they follow embracing the flags, the ideas, because from the debate of ideas a better country is built, and above all, a democratic republic with a future,” the candidate said after learning that he had won the presidential elections in Uruguay.
“Today begins a path of peace, of tolerance, a safe path to the future. And we come to unite. They have wanted to divide us, they have told us that our Broad Front is the worst in history, and we are proud of our Broad Front , of this Frente Amplio,” declared the vice president-elect, Carolina Cosse, before the militants gathered to celebrate the victory of the Frente Amplio against the candidate of the ruling National Party, Álvaro Delgado.
Precisely, after knowing the projections that gave the electoral victory to the Frente Amplio, Delgado congratulated his rival: “With sadness, of course, but without a guilt complex, we can congratulate whoever won. We do it with sincerity and from the heart, with detachment and with a very republican sense,” said the official candidate.
Followers of the Frente Amplio celebrate the electoral victory in the second round of the presidential elections in Uruguay.
Who is Yamandu Orsi?
A gift for people borne by his decades as a history teacher and by 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 called 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.
Folk dance was an extracurricular activity when Orsi was studying at high school and he, a fan of popular singing and Uruguayan folklore by artists such as Los Zucará, Alfredo Zitarrosa or Santiago Chalar, found in it a youthful passion with which he won a competition and continued practicing for eleven years. During the dictatorship, attracted by figures like ‘Che’ Guevara, he began 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 by “Pepe” Mujica and former guerrillas of the National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros, he had begun a career in International Relations that in a month he changed to teaching History.
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.
The elected president of Uruguay, Yamandú Orsi, hugs his wife Laura Alonso
After his first marriage, the current winning presidential candidate met Laura Alonso Pérez 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, not because on March 1, 2024 he resigned. to launch himself 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 resolve 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 go through the country of certainties, through the project of certainty. “, 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’s what I’m going towards. I’m going to be a militant all my life and I’m going to always participate in political activity,” he declared this Sunday when he went to vote. . And at night he became the new president after winning the second round of the elections that named him the third left-wing president in the history of Uruguay.
