Uruguayan ex-president Mujica’s godson imagines being president

Identified by former president José “Pepe” Mujica as a kind of successor, the current mayor of Canelones (southern Uruguay), Yamandú Orsi, confesses that “sometimes he imagines” being the politician who returns the left to the Presidency of the country, which he would consider “a pride”.

A teacher by training and dedicated to politics for “the possibility of transforming reality”, the politician gives an interview to Efe in a quiet bar in La Paz, one of those typical ‘Galician’ corners in Uruguay, where dishes of the day coexist with “masitas” (pastries), and time seems to stop between its windows, a flag of the country, photos of Galicia and even a Deportivo de La Coruña clock.

In that bordering point between his department (province) and that of Montevideo, Orsi observes with “caution” a recent survey that places him, among a sea of undecided (30%), as “the next president” of Uruguay, with 18% of support, 8 points more than the current Secretary of the Presidency, the center-right Álvaro Delgado, and nine over the mayor of Montevideo, the leftist Carolina Cosse.

Although he has not yet made his candidacy official for the 2024 elections, it is clear that he is one of the most prominent names within the Frente Amplio (FA), a leftist coalition that governed the country between 2005 and 2020, with two mandates of Tabaré Vázquez and one of Mujica, precisely the man who has him as his political godson.

THE MENTION OF PEPE

Despite his retirement from the Senate in 2020, at the same time as his political opponent and also former president Julio María Sanguinetti, Mujica is still very present in the political life of the FA, today the main national opposition force, and has not tired of publicly blessing Orsi as ‘his’ candidate for the 2024 elections.

“I take it as a privilege, as a pride that someone like Pepe identifies me, no more than that nor less than that, please; it is an honor”, indicates Orsi, although he recognizes that this does not assure a triumph, since, “the citizenship thinks with its own head and decides based on conviction”.

The politician, who belongs to the same sector as Mujica, the Movement of Popular Participation (MPP), the most voted within the FA, values as “unique” the figure of the former guerrilla who became president of Uruguay between 2010 and 2015.

“Someone who has transcended borders (from Uruguay) like Pepe, I do not know. It has to do with some postures and an attitude towards life that places him in a very different place from the normal political class,” he explains.

Orsi faces his second mandate in Canelones, the second most populated department of Uruguay, behind Montevideo (1.3 million), with almost 600,000 inhabitants, out of the 3.3 million of the country, a region of high agricultural production and that in recent times has received substantial investments from technological and pharmaceutical companies, among others.

In his opinion, a relevant aspect of Mujica is that “he was the one who most understood the role of the productive and the interior of the country and allowed to connect the urban Frente Amplio, from the capital, with that deep Uruguay”. Something in which, in his opinion, the formation will have to abound in capturing votes lost in 2019, when the center-right Luis Lacalle Pou won against Daniel Martínez.

“When a party, fundamentally from the management, settles in a kind of decision-making entelechy and loses contact with reality, what happened to us happens to it”, he commented on the defeat after 15 years of government.

THE MANAGEMENT OF LACALLE POU

Regarding the current coalition government led by Lacalle Pou, he believes that “there is an excessive centrality in the figure of the president” and that this leads to “blurring the rest”.

“I think that there is a very vertical dose of command and control, and this is an analysis that I make towards the internal Government and the Government parties”, says Orsi, who defends that the management of the pandemic was not “so bad”.

However, he criticizes the economic and social policy and the steps taken in international relations by the Executive.

Regarding the former, he asserts that “there is a kind of obsession with the shrinking or backwardness (of the State),” and, regarding the latter, he sees that “keys of domestic policy condition the messages for foreign policy too much.”

Specifically, the intention of the Executive to relax the rules of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and even to negotiate agreements outside the bloc is an “act of little humility,” according to Orsi.

DREAM OR REALITY?

In addition to valuing as “positive” that Lacalle considered him months ago a “contender”, Orsi confesses that he “has not dreamed” of wearing the presidential sash, even though “sometimes” he has imagined it.

“From the responsibility in a collective as my party, there, I have imagined it; what it would imply. And as I have a great team vocation, that is a mark of mine, not that image of the sash and the symbolic, but from assuming new responsibilities and going for more,” he acknowledges.

A lover of reading and cinema and of playing with his twins when he has free time, Orsi confesses Mujica’s inheritance in his “vocation” for dialogue with political rivals, even though he establishes red lines such as “human rights or the welfare state”.

And when asked if he would like to be the politician who brings the left back to power in Uruguay, he concludes: “If someone says no and he is a leftist politician, be suspicious. Yes, of course, it is divine (…) It would be a pride, an honor”.

With information from EFE