Elections in Uruguay: History professor Yamando Orsi, to the left of José Mujica, who will be the new president

Yamandu Orsi lived his first years in a simple house, without electricity, with a Turkish-style toilet and in such a rural area of ​​Uruguay that, when the ambulance came, he hid because he had never seen anything like it.

His only sister, who is about seven years older than him, remembers that she searched for him until she found him.

“He was crouching between the wardrobe and the bed and his eyes were bulging out of his face in fear,” Lujan Orsi told BBC Mundo.

The ambulance was coming not for her but for her father, who was immobilized due to a herniated disc from working at a winery sulfating vines to sell grapes.

But Orsi, barely four years old, was unaware of this. I was also unaware of this At that time, his life was taking a surprising turn that led him to be elected President of Uruguay this Sunday.

With 98% of the circuits counted, Orsi received 49.8% of the vote and won in a runoff against ruling party Álvaro Delgado as the Delfin candidate of the leftist opposition coalition Frente Amplio and former president José “Pepe” Mujica (2010). of. -2015).

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

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

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

became the place “The confession of human joys and sorrows,” Luján recalls, and this helped his brother see the social differences he highlights in his speeches today.And he even learned personal relationships with the people he claims to have in politics.

“Maybe it was polished there,” reflects the sister who taught the now president to read, write, add and subtract as his teacher, when they still lived in the countryside and Did not start formal education.

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

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

By that time, Orsi’s greatest passion was folk dancing, an activity that led him to join the municipal ballet and travel to festivals in the area: 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 Olimarenos – influenced Orsi’s inclination toward the political left, which led to arguments with his parents. , who voted for conservative options. And they will vote for him before he dies years later.

The time spent at the Artigas Teachers Institute (IPA) in Montevideo was also important in his ideological direction. 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 theory and claims pragmatism in politics.

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

“He looks like Mujica without Mujica’s charismaWithout his magic or his gift of words, and without so many years at the helm,” Garcé told BBC Mundo. “Pepe chose him for a reason: because he’s a good product of the school.”

Orsi is remarried to Laura Alonso Pérez, a dancer and choreographer, with whom he has two twins, a girl and a boy who have just turned 12, through fertilization at the age of 45.

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

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

He began his militancy in the Frente Amplio in the Canelones Committee and, In 1990, he joined the group that Mujica had formed with other former Tupamaro guerrillas Within that coalition of leftist parties: the Movement for Popular Participation (MPP).

Next year, He graduated as a history teacher and taught in public high schools in the interior of the country.

Going from one to another on public transportation and returning to the warehouse at the end of the day.

Although he devoted himself to teaching almost incidentally – he also enrolled to study International Relations, but dropped out after a month – he developed his vocation for that profession while still teaching.

Some former students remember him fondly.

“Outside the scope of his subject matter, whatever we needed he was always there,” says Karen Horminoguez, who had Orsi as a teacher at a high school in Santa Lucia, a city of fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. “He would come on the bus every day with his cap and his bottle,” recalls a 47-year-old woman who came to welcome him at a recent campaign event.

On the other hand, other alumni have difficulty remembering it.

Orsi’s life took another unexpected turn in 2005, when The MPP elected him Secretary General of the Municipality of Canelones.

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

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

Orsi became candidate for the Frente Amplio in the June internal elections, when he defeated Carolina Cosé, the former mayor of Montevideo, who is today his vice-president.

Mujica often says that Mayer’s management prepared Orsi for the presidency because Canelones is a “Uruguay in miniature”, encompassing rural areas and cities, industry, agriculture and beach tourism.

On its territory, there are areas of precarious housing for private neighborhoods typical of wealthy Uruguay and Argentina.

But the quiet election campaign also revealed differences in style between Orsi and Mujica, who at times used more combative rhetoric than his dolphin counterpart during treatment for esophageal cancer at the age of 89.

“If Orsi has a flaw, do you know what it is? “It’s great,” Mujica said. on local radio Sarandí in April, following a false complaint by two trans women against the candidate, who was convicted of slander and other crimes.

At the regional level, Orsi has called the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro a “dictatorship” and said he feels identified with Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, then Gabriel Boric of Chile and then Gustavo Petro of Colombia. , in that order.

His victory this Sunday marks the return to power of the Frente Amplio, which ruled Uruguay between 2005 and 2020, but it remains to be seen whether Orsi will lead the diverse leftist coalition that Mujica has.

The president-elect now faces the challenge of delivering on his promises to boost economic growth and attack inequality, even without raising taxes or a majority in the Chamber of Deputies.

Political scientist Rosario Quirolo, professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Montevideo, believes that “there are several conditions of stability” that would serve the president-elect.

“Orsi is going to be president of a party that is very disciplined” and “that comes with a program, already defined by his economy minister, with trained political cadres who are already in charge of the government.” Have served three terms,” Quirolo tells BBC Mundo.

But Garcé predicts that Uruguay’s next president will be “under pressure from all sides, because he looks weak.”

“The unions are going to put pressure on him and the trade boards are going to put pressure on him,” he estimates. “And he’s going to try to explain it, because it’s another characteristic of the Tupa school and mujica. Is: They’re talking to people.”

Just like when that ambulance surprised him, Orsi is about to start a new phase in his life. But now his destiny is to run the Republic rather than the old neighborhood warehouse.

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