Elections in Uruguay: Yamandú Orsi, the history professor heir to the left of José Mujica, who will be the new president

Yamandú Orsi lived his first years in a humble house without electricity, with a Turkish-style toilet and in such a rural area of ​​Uruguay that, when that ambulance arrived, he hid because he had never seen one.

His only sister, almost seven years older, remembers that she searched for him until he found him.

“He was between the wardrobe and a bed, crouching there, with his eyes bulging out of his face with fright,” Luján Orsi tells BBC Mundo.

The ambulance was not coming for him but for his father, immobilized by a herniated disc that he suffered as a result of his work sulfating vines to sell grapes to a winery.

But Orsi, barely four years old, was unaware of that. I was also unaware that At that moment, his life was taking one of the surprising turns that would lead him to be elected president of Uruguay this Sunday.

With all the circuits counted, Orsi obtained 49.8% of the votes and triumphed in a runoff against the ruling party Álvaro Delgado as a candidate for the left-wing opposition coalition Frente Amplio and the leader of former president José “Pepe” Mujica (2010- 2015).

The political success of this 57-year-old history teacher is due to everything that came after the appearance of that strange ambulance.

The herniated disc forced Orsi's father to move with his family, in 1972, to the city of Canelones, about 55 kilometers north of Montevideo, to work and live in a warehouse.

It was a typical business of the time, an old corner house where the Orsi sold everything from fruit to kerosene and talked leisurely with both well-off clients and others at risk of unemployment.

The place became a “confessional of human joys and sorrows,” Luján recalls, and it helped his brother see the social differences that he highlights today in his speeches.and even so that he learned the personal relationship with the people he claims in politics.

“Maybe that was polished there,” reflects the sister, who had taught the now president to read, write, add and subtract by playing at being his teacher when they still lived in the countryside and he had not begun formal education.

In the city of Canelones, Orsi helped his parents with the warehouse work for more than two decades, in parallel with his studies: since he was a child, when he went to a public school in the area, until after graduating as a teacher.

His interest in politics awoke when he was a teenager, with the excitement in Uruguay for the return of democracy after the military dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1985.

Until then, Orsi's greatest passion was folk dance, an activity that led him to join a municipal ballet and travel to festivals in the region: something rare in a generation fascinated by rock.

Those who know him believe that the music of popular singers who returned to Uruguay from exile – such as Alfredo Zitarrosa or Los Olimareños – influenced Orsi's inclination towards the political left, something that led to arguments with his parents, who tended to vote for conservative options and Years later they would vote for him before they died.

Also important in his ideological direction was his time at the Artigas Teachers Institute (IPA) in Montevideo, where He trained as a teacher in an area with a strong presence of the left.

Orsi says that Marxism is a tool that helped him understand history, but he denies belonging to that philosophical doctrine and claims pragmatism in politics.

Political scientist Adolfo Garcé, professor at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, observes that Orsi's distinctive traits include “negotiation, adaptation to circumstances, little ideological backbone (and) flexibility of an invertebrate.”

“He looks like Mujica without Mujica's charismawithout his magic or the gift of words, and without so many years on top of him,” Garcé tells BBC Mundo. “Pepe chooses him for a reason: because he is a good product of the school.”

Orsi is remarried to Laura Alonsopérez, a dancer and choreographer with whom he had two twin children at the age of 45 through assisted fertilization, a girl and a boy who just turned 12.

He has a deep voice and the characteristic accent of his native department of Canelones, where the words are often silent and people are addressed with tú instead of the vo used in Montevideo.

Under the influence of his mother, a seamstress, he took communion and became an altar boy. But he moved away from religion when he entered politics and today he defines himself as an agnostic.

He began his militancy in the Frente Amplio in a Canelones committee and, In 1990, he joined the group that Mujica created with other former Tupamaro guerrillas within that coalition of left-wing parties: the Popular Participation Movement (MPP).

The following year, He graduated as a history teacher and taught in public high schools in the interior of the country.going from one to the other on public transport and returning to the warehouse at the end of the day.

Although he dedicated himself to teaching almost by chance – he also enrolled to study international relations, but dropped out after a month – he developed his vocation for that profession while teaching.

Some alumni remember him fondly.

“Out of the scope of his subject, he was always there for whatever we needed,” says Karen Horminoguez, who had Orsi as a teacher at a high school in Santa Lucía, a city of less than 20,000 inhabitants. “He came with his hat and his bottle on the bus every day,” recalls this 47-year-old woman who came up to greet him at a recent campaign event.

On the other hand, other alumni have a hard time remembering it.

Orsi's life took another unexpected turn in 2005, when The MPP elected him to be general secretary of the Canelones Municipality.

That first position of political trust led him to abandon teaching at the age of 38. A decade later, he was elected mayor of the department by popular vote, which borders Montevideo and which, with half a million inhabitants, is the second most populated in a country of 3.4 million.

He was re-elected in 2019 and He resigned from office last March, with high approval ratings, to launch his career for the presidency. promoted by the popular Mujica, who has known him for three decades and maintains a good political nose.

Orsi became a candidate for the Frente Amplio in the June internal elections, when he beat the former mayor of Montevideo, Carolina Cosse, today his vice president.

Mujica often says that the mayor's management prepared Orsi for the presidency because Canelones is a “Uruguay in miniature”, with countryside and city, industries, agriculture and beach tourism.

In its territory, there are areas with precarious housing to private neighborhoods for rich Uruguayans and Argentines.

But the quiet electoral campaign also revealed differences in style between Orsi and Mujica, who at 89 years of age assumed more combative rhetoric than his dolphin at times while overcoming treatment for esophageal cancer.

“If Orsi has a defect, do you know what it is? “It's too good,” said Mujica. to local radio Sarandí in April, after a false complaint against the candidate by two trans women who ended up convicted of slander and other crimes.

At the regional level, Orsi has called the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro a “dictatorship” and says he feels identified with the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then with the Chilean, Gabriel Boric, and then with the Colombian, Gustavo Petro, in that order.

His victory this Sunday marks the return to power of the Frente Amplio, which governed Uruguay between 2005 and 2020, but it remains to be seen if Orsi will lead that diverse left-wing coalition as Mujica has done.

The president-elect now has the challenge of fulfilling his promises to boost economic growth and attack inequality, without increasing taxes or having majorities in the Chamber of Deputies.

Political scientist Rosario Queirolo, professor in the department of social sciences at the Catholic University in Montevideo, believes that “There are several conditions of stability” who will serve the elected president.

“Orsi is going to be the president with a party that is very disciplined” and “that arrives with a program, which has already been defined by his Minister of Economy, with trained political cadres that have already served in three terms of government,” Queirolo tells BBC Mundo. .

But Garcé anticipates that the next Uruguayan president “will be pressured from all sides, because he looks weak.”

“The unions are going to pressure him and the business chambers are going to pressure him,” he anticipates. “AND He is going to try to articulate it, because that is another thing very typical of the Tupa school and Mujica: they are negotiating people.”.

Like when that ambulance surprised him, Orsi is about to begin a new stage in his life. But now, instead of an old neighborhood warehouse, his destiny is to run a republic.

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