INTRODUCTION

On November 29, after nearly a week of ballot recounts, Uruguay’s election authority recognized Luis Lacalle Pou, the candidate of the right-wing National Party, as the country’s next president following the second round of elections on November 24. Although the result was close, with Lacalle Pou winning over the center-left Broad Front (Frente Amplio or FA) candidate Daniel Martinez, by about 35,000 votes of the more than 2.3 million cast, it represented a repudiation of the Frente that had been the country’s governing party since 2005.

—Lance Selfa

Uruguay – The defeat, without extenuating circumstances, of the “governing party”

It’s official. As of March 1, 2020, Luis Lacalle Pou, of the National Party, will serve as president of the Republic, leading a coalition government made up of five right-wing parties.¹ At that time, the so-called “progressive era” that began on March 1, 2005 with the first term of former President Tabaré Vázquez, will be officially closed. The Frente Amplio (FA) will hang up its “party of government” clothes to dress as a “responsible opposition.”

In effect, there will be succession in power, under the format of a “rotation of parties” in the management of the capitalist state. Legitimized by the unassailable verdict at the ballot box. Even if the slightest difference between the two choices on the November 24 ballot points to a de facto tie vote between “two halves of country.”

The “transition” begins on Monday, December 2, with the meeting between President Tabaré Vázquez and president-elect Lacalle Pou. Meticulous information, a friendly relationship, without trauma or tension. Honoring the country’s storied  “civic tradition.”  Everything under control.

A total contrast to the turbulence sweeping the region. A system designed against the threat of insurrection. There is no danger of contagion, for now. The ideological counterrevolution under way for 15 years of progressive government deflated radical social demands, and tempered the antagonism between the ruling and popular classes. Straight-jacketing the idea of civil disobedience.

“Social peace” appeared to be a gain for citizens of the country. Only the “marginalized,” like drug addicts, hired killers, criminals and “lumpen-consumers” appeared to challenge this, threatening public safety. For this reason, the majority of the population looks to the State for protection and authority. With the new government, repression will increase. The prisons will continue to fill up, mainly with young people. Any social insubordination will be punished with an iron fist.

[There will be] no capital flight or sabotage of the “markets.” The financial rating agencies, although concerned about the budget deficit, have already signaled that they approve of the election results. The international financial institutions are barely paying attention. They know that there will be little change in the government’s macroeconomic policies, despite the rhetoric about the “two models of the country” that dominated in the electoral campaign.

But the pillars of government policy are the same. These they were erected in the years of coalition between the Colorado Party and the National Party, in the so-called “lost decade” of the 1990s: the Forestry Law; the Investment Law; the Ports Law; the Free Trade Zones Law; the System of Administrators of Pension Savings Funds (AFAP).

None of these laws was repealed in the 15 years of “progressive hegemony.” On the contrary, the Frente Amplio (FA) based its economic program on this legacy. Financial deregulation; the concentration of land and its increasingly multinational ownership; tax exemptions for paper and mining multinationals; privatizations and subcontracting. And the Public-Private Participation (PPP) and “Financial Inclusion” laws, under Mújica’s term (2010-2015) as president. [Note: The PPP describes public-private partnership projects that involved private sector firms in building and operating public infrastructure such as schools, prisons and roads.  “Financial inclusion” is a government policy of encouraging access to financial services, effectively providing thousands of new customers to the banking sector.]

It’s all to the advantage of the neoliberal coalition. The new government will not have to use a new battery of counter-reforms to push through austerity. Except for social security, beginning with raising the retirement age. But for this, as is already known, it already has agreement from the Frente Amplio.

In the progressive “parenthesis” or interregnum, neoliberalism and “post-neoliberalism” coexisted without breaking from the logic of capital accumulation. Now, the hard-core neoliberals are assuming direct command, and they intend to accelerate the mechanisms of private wealth appropriation. Without having to break up the pieces of the basic contract of “market democracy.” In this, too, the “political class” on all sides of the ideological spectrum agrees.

This ideological camouflage works. It is the “comparative advantage” of liberal democracy, and deeply rooted in society. Organized by ruling class, but winning the consent of the masses. This is the meaning of the unchallenged “republican pact” for which both progressive and right-wing elites have and will continue to vouch. To put it in somewhat old-fashioned language: there is a consensus for the reigning political regime. It’s robust and longs for institutional stability. It provides the necessary conditions for “governability,” independent of parliamentary majorities or minorities. This has been the case since the restoration of democracy in 1985 after 12 years of military dictatorship.

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Of course, there’s bitterness in society. Above all, the 400,000 workers who don’t earn twice the minimum wage in a month² come to mind; or the 120,000 retirees with lowered—in other words, miserable—benefits³; of the 54,000 workers who lost their jobs in the last five years in industry, construction, retail trade, and agriculture. Or the 30 percent of unemployed youth under 25, who are forced to survive in the hopelessness of having no future. Or the more than 193,000 people who live in 600 shanty towns, where “structural poverty” is reproduced, affecting, above all, female heads of household, children and adolescents. Or the 20,000 people who, at one time, slept on the street in the last three years.

These are inescapable facts. They present a clear snapshot of the socio-economic “divide” that the progressive government and its targeted assistance plans never addressed. These affect hundreds of thousands of people. They make up that segment of the population classified as “poor” (earning less than $ 4 dollars a day U.S.) and the “vulnerable middle class” (between  $10 and  $15 dollars a day), according to the most rigorous study on income, employment, housing, health, education, family structure, and age, of the so-called “subordinate classes” in the country.⁴

Still, many of them voted for the FA, as they had before. They tried to hold onto a thread of trust. Especially the youngest group—between 18 and 34 years old—which massively (55 percent) supported the Daniel Martínez-Graciela Villar ticket.

They knew, from their general class instinct, that their already frustrating living conditions would not improve under a “multicolored” right-wing coalition government. They understood, without too much analytical sophistication, the danger of the growth of the extreme right. Although disenchanted, they dug in and voted for the “lesser evil” and to stop “fascism.”

This courageous decision does not assure immediate struggles, nor predict massive future resistance. Nor does it foreshadow a wave of big strikes or “social explosions” in the streets. It only indicates that there is a social base with the capacity to react, and a “democratic inheritance”  that, even in the midst of anger, confusion and exhaustion, can perceive an  ideological divid that they can’t cross. This is one of the countless reasons why so many thousands of Cabido Abierto and Colorado Party voters, on October 27, opted, at the last moment, for the FA in the ballot.⁵

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However, there are powerful political machines that are committed to dampening expressions of popular protest and rebellion. The bureaucratic union apparatuses and the majority of the Secretariat of the PIT-CNT (Interunion Workers Plenary-National Workers Convention, the main union federation that tends to support the FA) that, surely, will seek to regulate the social conflict they warned against if Lacalle Pou’s neoliberal coalition won. After November 24, they have become more cautious. And of course, the main leaders of the FA have already proposed to cooperate with the new government, especially with its “center-right” wing.

Trying to lay out a perspective, the former president and senator-elect, José Mujica, advanced a possible strategy: “the new government should not be uselessly bombarded, it should be fought on those things that it considers important for the people.”⁶ Reasonable argument, according to leaders close to Lacalle Pou, such as Senator Álvaro Delgado, a future secretary of the presidency: Mujica is “a fundamental interlocutor” and “a key actor in this process.”⁷

The president of the Frente Amplio, Javier Miranda, was more explicit. The important thing is to “maintain a dialogue” with the future government and “not to push Lacalle Pou into the arms of his far-right partners,”  that is, Cabildo Abierto led by General  Guido Manini Ríos, an extreme rightist,  although not considered a fascist like Bolsonaro in Brazil. Rather, they seek understandings with the democratic forces of the right-wing coalition, including the National Party and the Colorado Party. And in no way, he emphasized, will the Frente Amplio “set the prairie on fire.”⁸ There is a clear and not-so-distant precedent that gives credence to that assertion. When the worst economic-financial crisis in the country’s history hit in 2001-2002, and in the midst of a frightening social crisis, the Frente Amplio discouraged any “insurrectionary process” similar to the “Argentinazo” (2000-2001) and declared its “loyalty” to the country’s institutions.

These are not just historical talking points, but decisive notes for today. That’s even clearer if we consider that the leadership of the Frente Amplio and its army of officials and parliamentarians, after the first round results of October 27, had thrown in the towel, and assumed the second round was lost. That is why the FA’s celebration on the night of November 24 was all the more crass. There was no “near victory,” but its opposite: an unmitigated political defeat of the FA as a “governing party,” administrator of State affairs, including its “representative” institutions and its coercive apparatuses, in the “inviolable” framework of the capitalist order. For 15 years, this leadership worked to grind down revolutionary, anti-capitalist ideas, and to slam the door shut on radical social struggles and any emancipatory vision.

True, the FA continues to be the country’s main political force. It has governed Montevideo, the capital, for 29 years, and it, once again, won the department of Canelones [i.e., the second-most populous region adjacent to Montevideo]. Thus, it still governs the regions where more than half of Uruguay’s population is concentrated. However, these two bases of opposition to the new government do not change the new correlation of forces that the right’s victory created.

In October, the FA won in 9 departments; in November, only in two, with the coalition headed by Lacalle Pou taking 17. The FA’s leaders lost. Real power changed hands.

The dozens of academics, political activists and social activists who, shortly before the Election Day, signed an “Open Letter to the Left,” calling unenthusiastically for a vote for the FA, should also tell us about the new political reality. Recently, they had been very critical of the FA, bordering on threatening a political break, in light of the FA government’s rightward political and economic shift.

In the Open Letter, they wrote: “After three [FA] governments, those of us who are active in the social or political movements outside of the FA have not managed to organize the deep desire for change into a socialist political alternative. On the contrary, the first round of the national elections showed us that the FA continues to be—whether we like it or not—the subordinate sectors’ main political-electoral instrument. That is why its limits and deficiencies hurt us as if they were ours, because we are an active part of the Uruguayan popular political process.”⁹

After the defeat, and from the responsibility that falls to the leadership of the FA and the apparatuses it leads, the dilemma of yesterday now becomes a political crossroads. It’s clear that the FA’s strategy continues to be that of a party of the bourgeois order. That transformation will not be reversed. As a tool of social transformation, the FA ceased to exist a long time ago. Its move into opposition does not make it, once again, a “left option.” Its current makeup won’t change.

For its part, the victorious right knows that it does not have a blank check. Above all on questions of democracy, labor rights, recently won political and social gains, and public security. Families of the disappeared, in their tireless search for the truth, will not stand down just because there is a new government.

But the new government is determined to tip the balance, decisively, in favor of big capital. And it will not hesitate to deploy, if necessary, the armed bodies of the State. For now, it has already given us the first signal: the new Minister of the Interior will be Senator Jorge Larrañaga, the driving force behind the reactionary constitutional reform “Living without Fear,” which was defeated on October 27.¹⁰ A provocation, if you will. And at the same time a loud slap in the face to Fernando Pereira, president of the PIT-CNT, who a week before the vote, considered Larrañaga as part of the “left arm” of the right-wing coalition, and possible partner on some issues.¹¹ This single example could well symbolize the political debacle the FA leaders and their union allies face. It’s also a warning that shows why workers and militants on the left can have no confidence in them to lead a struggle.

Notes

Ernesto Herrera

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Ernesto Herrera is the editor of Correspondencia de Prensa, a Spanish-language socialist news site. He is a veteran socialist militant with a deep knowledge of Latin American and world politics.

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