Explainer: Uruguay's 2024 General Elections

Although there are 11 candidates on the presidential ballot on October 27, only three are polling above 10 percent in voter intention surveys: Orsi, Delgado, and the Colorado Party’s Andrés Ojeda.

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Yamandú Orsi

Atop the polls with just under 45 percent of voter intention is Yamandú Orsi, the candidate of the Broad Front opposition coalition that groups most of Uruguay’s leftist parties. A former high school history teacher, Orsi was most recently a two-term mayor of Canelones (2015–2020, 2020–2024), the country’s second-most populous department after neighboring Montevideo. Canelones has been characterized as a microcosm of Uruguay for its mix of urban and rural areas, a fact that party leaders are banking on to boost Orsi’s appeal with voters outside the capital city.

Within the Broad Front, Orsi belongs to the Popular Participation Movement, a social democratic party led by ex-President José “Pepe” Mujica. Orsi has earned comparisons to the former leftist president due to his humble farming background, folksy charm, and willingness to work across the aisle. As mayor, Orsi enacted policies that sought to increase investment in Canelones and was part of negotiations that brought Google’s $850 million data center to the department’s Science Park.

Orsi’s campaign is pitching expanding Uruguay’s social safety net by increasing financial aid to lower-income workers and households, while finding ways to keep a greater proportion of tax revenues from multinational corporations within Uruguay. His running mate is Carolina Cosse, the former mayor of Montevideo (2020–2024).

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Álvaro Delgado

Given that Uruguay’s constitution does not allow for consecutive reelection, President Luis Lacalle Pou, a popular leader with an approval rating just under 50 percent, will not appear as the nominee for his National Party. It will instead be his former chief of staff, Álvaro Delgado. 

Delgado has labelled his manifesto the “second tier of transformation” and is expected to carry on Lacalle Pou’s agenda, which has focused on improving economic competitiveness by reducing bureaucracy and pushing for expanding the country’s free trade agreements. Delgado has also highlighted Uruguay’s high rates of child poverty—one in five children live under the poverty line—as a priority issue. 

In the likelihood that Delgado makes it to a run-off—scheduled for November 24—he will need to win over the supporters of the other candidates from parties within the governing coalition. This would be a repeat of the 2019 election, which saw the formation of the right-of-center Multicolor Coalition (now called the Republican Coalition) that propelled Lacalle Pou’s victory in the second round. Delgado’s running mate is Valeria Ripoll, a former trade union leader once affiliated with the Communist Party who joined the National Party just one year ago.

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Andrés Ojeda

Trailing in third is Andrés Ojeda of the Colorado Party, one of Uruguay’s oldest political parties. Ojeda is a criminal lawyer and TV pundit who has leveraged his social media savvy to pitch himself as a new generation of leadership for conservative voters. Ojeda is a proponent of reducing government expenditure and has placed emphasis on addressing mental health and animal welfare issues. 

On October 27, voters will also elect all 99 members of the Chamber of Representatives alongside all 30 members of the Chamber of Senators. Parliamentary seats in Uruguay are allocated according to the proportion of votes each party receives nationally. Each of Uruguay’s 19 administrative departments must have at least two representatives in the lower house. The vice president serves as the 31st member of the Senate and presides over this chamber.  

A voter intention survey conducted by Factum suggests that the Broad Front is set to make gains in both the upper and lower houses, and could win up to half of available seats, up from the 42 percent they currently hold. Within the right-wing bloc, the National Party is again projected to be the largest party, retaining 30 percent of all seats, followed by the Colorado Party with 16 percent. Cabildo Abierto, or Open Townhall, a socially conservative, nationalist party that caught pollsters off-guard when it won 11 percent of the vote in its first electoral outing in 2019, appears set to lose two-thirds of their seats in Congress.

Of the two referenda on the ballot in these elections, one dealing with public security and the other with social security, the former appears more likely to be approved.  

Insecurity ranks as the top concern for voters in this election, with 29 percent of respondents in a major poll stating it was the country’s main problem. The public security referendum asks Uruguayans whether to remove the constitutional restriction on nighttime police raids of private residences. Polling indicates that about two-thirds of voters are in favor, despite opposition from the Broad Front.

The plebiscite was put forward by the governing coalition as a means of tackling street-level drug trafficking. Uruguay has become a transit point for cocaine in recent years and its 2023 homicide rate of 11.2 per 100,000 is significantly above that of neighboring Chile (4.5) and Paraguay (6.2), though still relatively low compared to the region as a whole. 

The second referendum question has proven more divisive. Posed by the national trade union federation, it seeks not only to undo a 2023 pension reform but also proposes sweeping changes to the pension system generally. Its three components are: bringing the retirement age back down from 65 to 60, tying pensions to the minimum wage, and eliminating private pension fund managers, known as AFAPs.

Apart from some factions of the Broad Front, leaders across the political spectrum have spoken out against the referendum, arguing that these changes are not fiscally sustainable given Uruguay’s aging population. On October 1, President Lacalle Pou held a press conference urging the population not to vote for the plebiscite. Days earlier, former President Mujica was quoted in an interview as saying the proposed policy changes would “cause chaos” for Uruguay’s economic future.

Most polling data suggests that voters have not yet settled on a decision about this referendum, with support ranging from 33 to 43 percent, and almost 25 percent of voters still unsure. However, one pollster shows 53 percent of the electorate intending to vote yes. Having broken the referendum down into its three constituent proposals, the survey indicates that while most voters favor lowering the retirement age and matching pensions to the minimum wage, getting rid of the private pension fund managers is decidedly less popular.

In a recent episode of the Latin America in Focus podcast, Saldías posited that, should the population vote in favor of this referendum despite the warnings from the political establishment, it would surface issues of representation and governability unfamiliar in contemporary Uruguayan politics.