Uruguay general election 2024: primaries 6/30, general 10/27, potential runoff 11/24

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

Sleepy Uruguay has a general election this year, with primaries in just over a month. The ruling center-right “multicolor coalition”, led by the Partido Nacional/Blancos, is seeking a second term, while the center-left/left-wing Frente Amplio wants to return to power after fifteen years controlling the presidency, followed by a surprisingly close runoff loss in 2019. The president and vice president of Uruguay are elected in a two-round system; only once has a runoff been avoided (in the FA landslide of 2004). The bicameral legislature is elected by nationwide proportional representation, with multiple lists per party, although deputies are distributed throughout the 19 departments in ways I don’t fully understand.

BACKGROUND

Uruguay has had consistently stable and peaceful transitions of power since the end of a civil-military dictatorship in 1985, as well as largely before then since the early 1900s (with the exception of the 1930s and early 40s). The country’s politics have been dominated by the Colorado (Red) and National (White) parties since its founding, with a series of civil wars, truces, and regional power-sharing agreements throughout the 19th century giving way to traditional electoral politics at the beginning of the 20th century. The liberal and historically social democratic Colorados dominated politics until the late 1950s, establishing a large state-owned economic apparatus and significant welfare state under the political philosophy of batllismo (four Uruguayan presidents have been named Batlle). After a recession in 1955, the Blancos took power and the nation’s political system appeared to be headed towards stable bipartisanship, but lingering economic malaise and the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and the Cold War led to greater and greater tensions, including the drift of some elements of the Colorados towards authoritarianism in the face of leftist guerrilla movements like the Tupamaros.

The left consolidated its forces into the Frente Amplio party in 1971, achieving 20% of the presidential vote that year, but several years into his term President Juan María Bordaberry (elected through a weird and complicated system) dissolved parliament and introduced military rule, which lasted until 1985 with a series of civilian and military leaders (of both major parties and none). All three parties had elements that at one point or another supported and opposed military rule, and after a military-written constitution failed in a national plebiscite, the leaders agreed to a managed transition to democracy. Since then the three parties - Blancos, Colorados, and Frente Amplio - have all had at least two terms in government, but the Colorados have essentially sunk down to minor-party status after a brutal economic crisis in 2002 (at least in part a knock-on effect of the recent Argentinian recession: it is said that when Argentina sneezes, Uruguay catches a cold), and the FA has taken many of their historically progressive voters. The current political spectrum appears to be trending back towards a bipolar system, away from the three-party period of 1985-2000: the FA on the left and the Blancos, Colorados, and right-populist Cabildo Abierto (a name which translates to something like “Open Meeting”) on the right.

PARTIES

Frente Amplio:

The FA was founded as a merger of various left-wing parties, along with dissidents from the two major parties, in 1971. After the dictatorship, it made the then (and even today, for some) contentious decision to incorporate the former Tupamaro guerrillas into its flanks. It was led for a long period of time by General Liber Seregni, and then by doctor and Montevideo mayor Tabaré Vázquez, who led the party to its first of three consecutive terms in office in 2004 on the back of the 2002 economic crisis. It  gets its votes largely from Montevideo and to a lesser extent from smaller cities in the interior, and has dominated the mayoralty of Montevideo since 1994. Major factions, which for various reasons in Uruguay are highly institutionalized, include the Communist Party (far-left, led by motormouth union leader and senator Oscar Andrade), the Socialist Party (historically more centrist but recently more and more left-dominated, currently led by former student leader Gonzalo Civila), the Movimiento de Participación Popular (the populist former Tupamaros, currently led by senator Lucía Topolansky), and the center-left seregnismo (a collection of various constantly-shifting factions). The FA has had two presidents: Vázquez (PS, 2005-2010, 2015-2020) and the famous José “Pepe” Mujica (MPP, 2010-2015). They lost their bid for a fourth term in 2019 with then-Montevideo mayor Daniel Martínez (PS).

Partido Nacional/Blancos

The Blancos are Uruguay’s historic second fiddle, first to the Colorados and now to the FA. Their party has been largely led by the Herrera-Lacalle dynasty, with the brief exception of Wilson Ferreira in the 70s and 80s, and has always represented the country’s economic elite and rural interests. Throughout the 19th century, Blanco leaders, most notably Aparicio Saravia, led various revolts against the Colorados who dominated the country from Montevideo, and occasionally received the right to control various provinces in the interior, before the end of the last rebellion in 1904. Longtime leader Luis Alberto Herrera led the party for decades during the era of Colorado dominance, furiously opposing the leftist batllista program. In the latter half of the 20th century, the rival wilsonista tendency emerged, led by Wilson Ferreira, a relatively left-leaning and highly principled figure who proposed widespread land reform in the 1971 election and may have had the election stolen from him with help from the US and Brazilian governments. He became the face of opposition to the dictatorship in exile (while many herreristas supported it) but died shortly after returning to the country during the nation’s transition to democracy. Since 1985 the party has elected two presidents, Luis Alberto Lacalle Herrera (1990-1995) and Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou (2020-present), on top of their two “collegial presidencies”, which came during a brief failed experiment with a Swiss-inspired group presidency. Lacalle Herrera is mostly known for several failed attempts at privatizing major swathes of the economy, most notably the water sector, while Lacalle Pou has received high marks for his management of the economy and the Covid pandemic but has seen his administration rocked by scandals, including the controversial expedited granting of a passport to a wanted drug trafficker in prison in Dubai and accusations of spying on his ex-wife and political opponents. The party is largely dominated by various herrerista factions, including Lacalle Pou’s faction “Todos”, with a significant wilsonista minority and a recently-insurgent group led by businessman-turned-senator Juan Sartori. Lacalle Pou has led the herrerista factions for around fifteen years now, and was the party’s presidential candidate in 2014 before his win in 2019. He loves to surf.

Partido Colorado

The Partido Colorado is kind of like the PRI. Long-standing historic party of government - continually held the presidency from 1865 to 1958 (with some interruptions by military governments in the late 19th century), the Colorados are the party that almost singlehandedly made Uruguay what it is today, largely due to the legendary José Batlle y Ordóñez (president 1903-1907 and 1911-1915) and his heirs and successors. They were a liberal social democratic party inspired by Enlightenment secularism and European progressivism, albeit always with a more classically liberal minority faction (known as riverismo), until around the late 60s when the party started to develop more authoritarian and conservative factions, most notably under Jorge Pacheco with his pachequismo, and then under Bordaberry. Since 1985, the party has seen a gradual decrease in its vote share as its historic progressive voter base flees to the FA, leaving the right-wing factions in the driver’s seat. Recently it has seen a resurgence of more centrist figures such as economist Ernesto Talvi, who was the party’s candidate in 2019 and briefly served as foreign minister under Lacalle Pou before quitting politics altogether a few months in. Talvi’s relatively new faction, the centrist and technocratic Ciudadanos, is fighting for dominance with the old-school Batllistas (now more economically right-wing than historically, and led by former president Julio Maria Sanguinetti) and the riverista-pachequista Vamos Uruguay faction, led by 2009 and 2014 presidential nominee Pedro Bordaberry. The Colorados have won three terms since the transition to democracy (under Sanguinetti, 1985-1990 and 1995-2000, and Jorge Batlle, 2000-2005), but are quickly fading into irrelevance. They have not governed a single department in decades, with the exception of Rivera (named after the party’s founder and Uruguay’s first president, most known today as a genocidaire par excellence). If they sink below the relatively new Cabildo Abierto in the general election this year, and/or lose control of Rivera next year, they’ll be essentially consigned to the dustbin of history.

Cabildo Abierto:

CA is the Uruguayan version of right-wing populism and regularly polls at a respectable 5-10% of the vote, essentially tied with the Colorados. They were founded by former commander in chief of the army Guido Manini Ríos, who was fired by Tabaré Vázquez after criticizing a military court’s approach to alleged perpetrators of human rights abuses during the dictatorship. This is the party all the people who think things were better under the dictatorship vote for.

Minor parties:

There are several minor parties: the Partido Independiente (centrist), which was founded as a moderate spinoff from the FA in the 2000s and participated in the Multicolor Coalition, led by labor minister Pablo Mieres; the Partido Ecologista Radical Intransigente (the worst kind of greens), which is the only non-FA opposition party in parliament and is led by César Vega; the Partido de la Gente (defunct), which is led by businessman Edgardo Novick. Etc.

CANDIDATES

There are three candidates running for the FA this time, but one of them doesn’t matter. They are coincidentally the party’s only three governors: Montevideo mayor Carolina Cosse, who has the support of the PS and PCU (communists), Yamandú Orsi of Canelones, who has the support of the MPP and seregnismo (former finance minister Mario Bergara dropped out and endorsed Orsi), and Andrés Lima of Salta, who has the support of some random faction he created. Orsi, seen as more moderate but with the approval of the ultimate populist Mujica, is the frontrunner based on his ability to appeal to more conservative rural areas. He had been the clear leader in the polls until an accusation of sexual assault by a trans sex worker threatened his bid, but the accuser recently recanted after it was revealed to by a fabrication by a Blanco party operative and political gadfly/troll named Romina Celeste. Cosse represents the Montevideo leftists who make up the party base. She ran in the primary last time and came in a disappointingly distant second place to Martinez, and hoped to be picked as his running mate, but he went with some random lady (OK, she was the city council president but still) who was also a gaffe machine. The party will likely pressure Orsi to pick her this time, shoring up the base and solidifying party unity, but he may go with a more moderate pick like Cristina Lustemberg.

The Blancos are also running four but really two candidates. Lacalle Pou’s chief of staff, Álvaro Delgado, is the clear frontrunner, and former Montevideo mayoral candidate (and independent) Laura Raffo, who had a strong showing in the last local elections, is in second. Jorge Gandini is also running as a wilsonista candidate and Juan Sartori as a…sartorista I guess, but neither is relevant. This is not an interesting primary; the only question is how much Delgado will win by. If it’s relatively close, he’ll likely pick Raffo as his running mate. If he wins by a wide margin, he may feel free to pick someone closer to him, likely someone else from the Lacalle Pou administration like finance minister Azucena Arbeleche.

The Colorados are facing by far the most complicated primary, with a host of candidates including frontrunners Robert Silva and Andrés Ojeda. Silva (Ciudadanos) was Talvi’s running mate in 2019 and is now the head of the National Public Education Agency, Also running are former Rivera governor and tourism minister under Lacalle Tabaré Viera (Batllistas), former head of ANTEL (state telecom company) Gabriel Gurméndez, and Carolina Ache, a former undersecretary of foreign relations who was thrown under the bus as part of one of the government’s scandals. I frankly don’t know much of the details of this one because it’s complicated and the battle lines are not as clearly delineated as they often are in, say, the FA. I apologize.

There may also be several plebiscites, as is tradition in Uruguay. One is promoted by the national labor confederation, the highly militant PIT-CNT, and seeks to reverse the Lacalle Pou government’s pension reform (most notably by reducing the retirement age from 65 back down to 60). It is supported by the left wing of the FA (PS, PCU, some minor factions like the PVP, etc) and the minor leftist parties, but not by Orsi, seregnismo, or any of the other major parties. There is another proposed plebiscite to reform the civil service at the local and regional levels, in a way that is not clear to me.

[Flyersfan232]

Sleepy Uruguay has a general election this year, with primaries in just over a month. The ruling center-right “multicolor coalition”, led by the Partido Nacional/Blancos, is seeking a second term, while the center-left/left-wing Frente Amplio wants to return to power after fifteen years controlling the presidency, followed by a surprisingly close runoff loss in 2019. The president and vice president of Uruguay are elected in a two-round system; only once has a runoff been avoided (in the FA landslide of 2004). The bicameral legislature is elected by nationwide proportional representation, with multiple lists per party, although deputies are distributed throughout the 19 departments in ways I don’t fully understand.

BACKGROUND

Uruguay has had consistently stable and peaceful transitions of power since the end of a civil-military dictatorship in 1985, as well as largely before then since the early 1900s (with the exception of the 1930s and early 40s). The country’s politics have been dominated by the Colorado (Red) and National (White) parties since its founding, with a series of civil wars, truces, and regional power-sharing agreements throughout the 19th century giving way to traditional electoral politics at the beginning of the 20th century. The liberal and historically social democratic Colorados dominated politics until the late 1950s, establishing a large state-owned economic apparatus and significant welfare state under the political philosophy of batllismo (four Uruguayan presidents have been named Batlle). After a recession in 1955, the Blancos took power and the nation’s political system appeared to be headed towards stable bipartisanship, but lingering economic malaise and the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and the Cold War led to greater and greater tensions, including the drift of some elements of the Colorados towards authoritarianism in the face of leftist guerrilla movements like the Tupamaros.

The left consolidated its forces into the Frente Amplio party in 1971, achieving 20% of the presidential vote that year, but several years into his term President Juan María Bordaberry (elected through a weird and complicated system) dissolved parliament and introduced military rule, which lasted until 1985 with a series of civilian and military leaders (of both major parties and none). All three parties had elements that at one point or another supported and opposed military rule, and after a military-written constitution failed in a national plebiscite, the leaders agreed to a managed transition to democracy. Since then the three parties - Blancos, Colorados, and Frente Amplio - have all had at least two terms in government, but the Colorados have essentially sunk down to minor-party status after a brutal economic crisis in 2002 (at least in part a knock-on effect of the recent Argentinian recession: it is said that when Argentina sneezes, Uruguay catches a cold), and the FA has taken many of their historically progressive voters. The current political spectrum appears to be trending back towards a bipolar system, away from the three-party period of 1985-2000: the FA on the left and the Blancos, Colorados, and right-populist Cabildo Abierto (a name which translates to something like “Open Meeting”) on the right.

PARTIES

Frente Amplio:

The FA was founded as a merger of various left-wing parties, along with dissidents from the two major parties, in 1971. After the dictatorship, it made the then (and even today, for some) contentious decision to incorporate the former Tupamaro guerrillas into its flanks. It was led for a long period of time by General Liber Seregni, and then by doctor and Montevideo mayor Tabaré Vázquez, who led the party to its first of three consecutive terms in office in 2004 on the back of the 2002 economic crisis. It  gets its votes largely from Montevideo and to a lesser extent from smaller cities in the interior, and has dominated the mayoralty of Montevideo since 1994. Major factions, which for various reasons in Uruguay are highly institutionalized, include the Communist Party (far-left, led by motormouth union leader and senator Oscar Andrade), the Socialist Party (historically more centrist but recently more and more left-dominated, currently led by former student leader Gonzalo Civila), the Movimiento de Participación Popular (the populist former Tupamaros, currently led by senator Alejandro Sanchez), and the center-left seregnismo (a collection of various constantly-shifting factions). The FA has had two presidents: Vázquez (PS, 2005-2010, 2015-2020) and the famous José “Pepe” Mujica (MPP, 2010-2015). They lost their bid for a fourth term in 2019 with then-Montevideo mayor Daniel Martínez (PS).

Partido Nacional/Blancos

The Blancos are Uruguay’s historic second fiddle, first to the Colorados and now to the FA. Their party has been largely led by the Herrera-Lacalle dynasty, with the brief exception of Wilson Ferreira in the 70s and 80s, and has always represented the country’s economic elite and rural interests. Throughout the 19th century, Blanco leaders, most notably Aparicio Saravia, led various revolts against the Colorados who dominated the country from Montevideo, and occasionally received the right to control various provinces in the interior, before the end of the last rebellion in 1904. Longtime leader Luis Alberto Herrera led the party for decades during the era of Colorado dominance, furiously opposing the leftist batllista program. In the latter half of the 20th century, the rival wilsonista tendency emerged, led by Wilson Ferreira, a relatively left-leaning and highly principled figure who proposed widespread land reform in the 1971 election and may have had the election stolen from him with help from the US and Brazilian governments. He became the face of opposition to the dictatorship in exile (while many herreristas supported it) but died shortly after returning to the country during the nation’s transition to democracy. Since 1985 the party has elected two presidents, Luis Alberto Lacalle Herrera (1990-1995) and Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou (2020-present), on top of their two “collegial presidencies”, which came during a brief failed experiment with a Swiss-inspired group presidency. Lacalle Herrera is mostly known for several failed attempts at privatizing major swathes of the economy, most notably the water sector, while Lacalle Pou has received high marks for his management of the economy and the Covid pandemic but has seen his administration rocked by scandals, including the controversial expedited granting of a passport to a wanted drug trafficker in prison in Dubai and accusations of spying on his ex-wife and political opponents. The party is largely dominated by various herrerista factions, including Lacalle Pou’s faction “Todos”, with a significant wilsonista minority and a recently-insurgent group led by businessman-turned-senator Juan Sartori. Lacalle Pou has led the herrerista factions for around fifteen years now, and was the party’s presidential candidate in 2014 before his win in 2019. He loves to surf.

Partido Colorado

The Partido Colorado is kind of like the PRI. Long-standing historic party of government - continually held the presidency from 1865 to 1958 (with some interruptions by military governments in the late 19th century), the Colorados are the party that almost singlehandedly made Uruguay what it is today, largely due to the legendary José Batlle y Ordóñez (president 1903-1907 and 1911-1915) and his heirs and successors. They were a liberal social democratic party inspired by Enlightenment secularism and European progressivism, albeit always with a more classically liberal minority faction (known as riverismo), until around the late 60s when the party started to develop more authoritarian and conservative factions, most notably under Jorge Pacheco with his pachequismo, and then under Bordaberry. Since 1985, the party has seen a gradual decrease in its vote share as its historic progressive voter base flees to the FA, leaving the right-wing factions in the driver’s seat. Recently it has seen a resurgence of more centrist figures such as economist Ernesto Talvi, who was the party’s candidate in 2019 and briefly served as foreign minister under Lacalle Pou before quitting politics altogether a few months in. Talvi’s relatively new faction, the centrist and technocratic Ciudadanos, is fighting for dominance with the old-school Batllistas (now more economically right-wing than historically, and led by former president Julio Maria Sanguinetti) and the riverista-pachequista Vamos Uruguay faction, led by 2009 and 2014 presidential nominee Pedro Bordaberry. The Colorados have won three terms since the transition to democracy (under Sanguinetti, 1985-1990 and 1995-2000, and Jorge Batlle, 2000-2005), but are quickly fading into irrelevance. They have not governed a single department in decades, with the exception of Rivera (named after the party’s founder and Uruguay’s first president, most known today as a genocidaire par excellence). If they sink below the relatively new Cabildo Abierto in the general election this year, and/or lose control of Rivera next year, they’ll be essentially consigned to the dustbin of history.

Cabildo Abierto:

CA is the Uruguayan version of right-wing populism and regularly polls at a respectable 5-10% of the vote, essentially tied with the Colorados. They were founded by former commander in chief of the army Guido Manini Ríos, who was fired by Tabaré Vázquez after criticizing a military court’s approach to alleged perpetrators of human rights abuses during the dictatorship. This is the party all the people who think things were better under the dictatorship vote for.

Minor parties:

There are several minor parties: the Partido Independiente (centrist), which was founded as a moderate spinoff from the FA in the 2000s and participated in the Multicolor Coalition, led by labor minister Pablo Mieres; the Partido Ecologista Radical Intransigente (the worst kind of greens), which is the only non-FA opposition party in parliament and is led by César Vega; the Partido de la Gente (defunct), which is led by businessman Edgardo Novick. Etc.

CANDIDATES

There are three candidates running for the FA this time, but one of them doesn’t matter. They are coincidentally the party’s only three governors: Montevideo mayor Carolina Cosse, who has the support of the PS and PCU (communists), Yamandú Orsi of Canelones, who has the support of the MPP and seregnismo (former finance minister Mario Bergara dropped out and endorsed Orsi), and Andrés Lima of Salta, who has the support of some random faction he created. Orsi, seen as more moderate but with the approval of the ultimate populist Mujica, is the frontrunner. He had been the clear leader in the polls until an accusation of sexual assault by a trans sex worker threatened his bid, but the accuser recently recanted after it was revealed to by a fabrication by a Blanco party operative and political gadfly/troll named Romina Celeste. Cosse ran in the primary last time and came in a disappointing second place to Martinez, and hoped to be picked as his running mate, but he went with some random lady (OK, she was the city council president but still) who was also a gaffe machine. The party will likely pressure Orsi to pick her this time and solidify party unity more strongly.

The Blancos are also running four but really two candidates. Lacalle Pou’s chief of staff, Álvaro Delgado, is the clear frontrunner, and former Montevideo mayoral candidate (and independent) Laura Raffo, who had a strong showing in the last local elections, is in second. Jorge Gandini is also running as a wilsonista candidate and Juan Sartori as a…sartorista I guess, but neither is relevant. This is not an interesting primary; the only question is how much Delgado will win by. If it’s relatively close, he’ll likely pick Raffo as his running mate. If he wins by a wide margin, he may feel free to pick someone closer to him, likely someone else from the Lacalle Pou administration like finance minister Azucena Arbeleche.

The Colorados are facing by far the most complicated primary, with a host of candidates including frontrunners Robert Silva and Andrés Ojeda. Silva (Ciudadanos) was Talvi’s running mate in 2019 and is now the head of the National Public Education Agency, Also running are former Rivera governor and tourism minister under Lacalle Tabaré Viera (Batllistas), former head of ANTEL (state telecom company) Gabriel Gurméndez, and Carolina Ache, a former undersecretary of foreign relations who was thrown under the bus as part of one of the government’s scandals. I frankly don’t know much of the details of this one because it’s complicated and the battle lines are not as clearly delineated as they often are in, say, the FA. I apologize.

There may also be several plebiscites, as is tradition in Uruguay. One is promoted by the national labor confederation, the highly militant PIT-CNT, and seeks to reverse the Lacalle Pou government’s pension reform (most notably by reducing the retirement age from 65 back down to 60). It is supported by the left wing of the FA (PS, PCU, some minor factions like the PVP, etc) and the minor leftist parties, but not by Orsi, seregnismo, or any of the other major parties. There is another proposed plebiscite to reform the civil service at the local and regional levels, in a way that is not clear to me.

what is the current expected outcome on the general

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

what is the current expected outcome on the general

I would say lean FA. They’re fairly consistently polling in the low-to-mid 40s, as opposed to the mid-to-high 30s they were getting last time (when they almost won - thanks to a strong runoff campaign featuring none other than Orsi himself), and Delgado is not an inspiring candidate. But the PN is definitely in contention as well.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

He spied on his ex wife?

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

He spied on his ex wife?

Allegedly. His head of personal security, Alejandro Astesiano, and various associates thereof, were apparently spying on former first lady Loli Ponce de León as well as two opposition senators (Charles Carrera and Mario Bergara), but it’s unknown what Lacalle knew and when he knew it. Astesiano was also running a passport forgery ring for Russians out of the Torre Ejecutiva, the government building office.

[Flyersfan232]

what is the current expected outcome on the general

I would say lean FA. They’re fairly consistently polling in the low-to-mid 40s, as opposed to the mid-to-high 30s they were getting last time (when they almost won - thanks to a strong runoff campaign featuring none other than Orsi himself), and Delgado is not an inspiring candidate. But the PN is definitely in contention as well.

could there be a outcome of a fa majority but a pn president?

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

what is the current expected outcome on the general

I would say lean FA. They’re fairly consistently polling in the low-to-mid 40s, as opposed to the mid-to-high 30s they were getting last time (when they almost won - thanks to a strong runoff campaign featuring none other than Orsi himself), and Delgado is not an inspiring candidate. But the PN is definitely in contention as well.

could there be a outcome of a fa majority but a pn president?

Highly unlikely. Voting is done by lists that include presidential and legislative candidates (placing a physical list in an envelope), so the votes for each tend to correlate almost exactly. You can’t really split your ticket by cutting a list in two like you can in Argentina; the closest you can get is putting two lists in that have the same presidential candidate but different legislative lists, so your vote would count for president but not for the legislature. So the FA would need about 47-8% of the overall first-round vote to get a majority in the legislature, and it’s very difficult to see them losing a runoff with a result like that unless Uruguay were to become extremely politically polarized in a way it just isn’t right now. The reverse is much more likely, and almost happened in 2019: a coalition majority with an FA president. In that case the FA would probably try to negotiate with more centrist parties like the Partido Independiente and the Colorados.

(FYI: PC = Partido Colorado, PCU = Partido Comunista de Uruguay)

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

Around the time I posted this thread, by the way, the president of the PN, Pablo Iturralde, was forced to resign after leaked text messages showed that he wanted to get a specific prosecutor (Alicia Ghione) on the sexual abuse case against former Senator Gustavo Penadés because she was “one of ours” and that “we have to pressure her”. The Penadés case was probably the biggest political scandal since Raúl Sendic had to resign the vice presidency having embezzled a ton of money during his time as director of state oil refinery ANCAP and also inventing a fake college degree, a scandal that severely tainted the FA’s image and led to their defeat in 2019 (alongside the sluggish economy). Sendic had been vice president during Tabaré Vázquez’s second term and hitherto the clear successor to the Tabaré-Mujica-Astori generation of FA leadership. This one could be bigger than that.

Iturralde, in the same conversation, said that Attorney General Juan Gómez “knows that [Ghione]’s ours” and referred to various criminal cases involving PN figures that she had apparently declined to prosecute: an alleged rape during a PN youth event in support of Lacalle Pou’s omnibus bill, various scandals involving Durazno governor Carmelo Vidalín, and an audio of Colonia governor Carlos Moreira demanding sexual favors from a woman in exchange for being hired.

Somewhat ironically, the Penadés case also grew from an accusation by Romina Celeste: that before her gender transition, when she was a minor, Penadés attempted to pay her for sex. Her story has been questioned by several in the wake of her accusation of Orsi being revealed as false, but by that time various young men had come forward saying that Penadés had also abused them when they were teens. I imagine the PN is not happy that the scandal, which they surely believed to be behind them with his expulsion from the Senate, is being dredged up again and affecting the highest levels of party leadership.