Uruguay, a small country nestled between Brazil and Argentina in South America’s Southern Cone, may not seem very politically significant compared to its larger and better-known neighbors. Despite the relative obscurity of the “paisito” (tiny country), it can boast of being home to the most successful progressive Left project in all of Latin America — the Frente Amplio (FA), or Broad Front.
After its founding in 1971 as a beacon fighting against the rise of military-led authoritarianism, the FA grew as an ideologically heterogeneous democratic left coalition party after Uruguay’s redemocratization in 1983. After years of governing the capital city, Montevideo, the FA won the 2005 presidential elections and implemented a transformative political program under Presidents Tabare Vasquez and the iconic Pepe Mujica during the first two decades of the 21st century. The FA expanded collective bargaining rights, brought former leaders of the military dictatorship to justice, and enshrined the right to abortion on demand. In the context of a regional resurgence of the far-right led by figures such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the FA lost the 2019 presidential race by a small margin. In October and November 2024, the FA engaged in a replay of that election against its principal rivals in the right-wing Partido Nacional (also known as the blancos). The DSA International Committee was honored to have been invited by the International Relations Commission of the FA to be an eyewitness to this important political moment.
The FA was formed at a time in the mid-20th century when other democratic left projects in countries such as Chile and Brazil were under siege or already experiencing direct repression. Unlike Allende’s Partido Socialista de Chile or Joao Goulart’s Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, the FA was created as a conglomeration of over a dozen distinct political forces whose ideologies ranged from moderate social Catholics, to Socialists allied with the Second International, to Communists and Maoists. Even today, these forces operate as discreet groupings within the larger organization that maintain their own individual identities and even distinct numbers on ballots for legislative elections, so that the candidates from any of these internal caucuses can be more readily distinguished from candidates from other FA caucuses. The FA defines itself as a “coalition and movement, based on reciprocal respect for ideological diversity, democratic functioning, and unity in action.”
Another aspect which distinguishes the FA from other left parties is that its leadership is not overly centralized in one charismatic figure, a common Latin American political characteristic personified both by revolutionary leaders like Fidel Castro as well as by modernizing populists such as Getulio Vargas and Juan Peron. Instead, each FA caucus has its own set of leaders, who contest internal elections to lead the party and head up the FA’s presidential and mayoral tickets. These contests stimulate generative ideological debates and avoid dangerous personalism. Finally, the FA invests in base-building through the construction of local-level “Comités de Base” that are ubiquitous in almost every Montevideo neighborhood, and through solidifying organic links with the labor, student, feminist, environmental, and human rights movements.
After the FA’s electoral defeat in 2019, the party decided to conduct a ground-up reflection on what went wrong. They launched a “self-criticism” process, conducting in-person listening sessions in over 300 localities across the country with voters both aligned and not formally aligned with the party, in order to understand why support for progressive social change dropped off and why the population seemed to become more individualist and more disengaged from the political process. This process culminated in the 2021 FA congress and the election of a new party president and vice-president, former union leader Fernando Pereira and the environmental activist Veronica Piñeiro, respectively.
After using this “self criticism” process to reconnect to the party rank-and-file as well as the electorate as a whole, the FA was able to use its solid connections to Uruguayan social movements to channel the political discontent caused by the neoliberal policies implemented by the blancos. These policies led to wage stagnation for public employees, greater concentration of ownership of the mass media, and cuts to education, health care, and social housing programs. In 2023 alone, unions linked to the FA led five national strikes and 118 other work stoppages that shook the foundations of the blanco government.
In the competitive June 2024 primaries, the FA elected a ticket consisting of Yamandu Orsi (from the Movimiento de Participación Popular caucus, which evolved from the Tupamaros guerilla group in the post-democratization period) and then-Mayor of Montevideo Carolina Cossio (principally backed by the Communist Party of Uruguay) as the party’s candidates for president and vice-president in the upcoming elections. The principal slogans of Orsi’s campaign was “Sabremos cumplir” (We will know how to deliver) and “Que gobierne la honestidad” (Let honesty govern), which evoked the FA’s years of successfully delivering social benefits and expressed the popular disapproval regarding the corruption scandals which surrounded several members of the governing circle of the blanco administration led by Luis Lacalle Pou.
Despite the growing unpopularity of the Lacalle Pou administration and the dense voter-to-voter outreach conducted by the FA’s Comites de Base during the campaign, the FA ticket was not able to win more than 50% of the overall vote during the first round of the elections on October 27, 2024. This pushed Orsi into a head-to-head contest against the candidate fielded by the Blancos, Alvaro Delgado, in a second round of the elections on November 24.
In the context of the budding relations with Latin American left parties that the DSA International Committee (IC) has fomented since the IC signed a memorandum of understanding with the Sao Paulo Forum in 2022, DSA was formally invited to observe the electoral process and provide political support to the FA during the weekend of the second round. The FA put together an extensive program of activities for the international guests that weekend, including discussion circles with party leaders and elected officials, visits to Comites de Base in working-class neighborhoods of Montevideo, and an invitation to watch the election results unfold with Orsi and Cossio themselves.
As a representative of the DSA International Committee, the tension in the air was palpable when I was received by the FA in Montevideo on the eve of the second round. Both Pereira and Piñeiro expressed apprehension that the electoral margin would be tight and that the result would only be finally decided by a hand count of the votes. Other electoral observers from the Sao Paulo Forum, the Peronist movement in Argentina and the newly-formed Frente Amplio of Chile, quietly confirmed to me their fears that a loss by the FA would be a signal of the “beginning of the end” of the “new pink tide” initiated half a decade ago in Latin America.
None of the fears of DSA’s Latin American partners assembled in Uruguay that weekend became reality. Thanks to high levels of voter turnout among communities that traditionally lean towards the FA, Orsi and Cossio registered a clear victory in the second round by a margin of 52% to 48%, without any need for legal interventions or hand recounts. Delgado respected the popular mandate given to Orsi and, different from other right-wing leaders, publicly communicated his acknowledgment of defeat almost immediately after the final results were announced. The new FA government is now scheduled to take office on March 1, 2025. The Uruguayan people are anxious for Orsi and Cossio to start putting into practice the policy platform that the FA campaigned on, which aims to promote more dynamic, sustainable and equitable economic growth, greater citizen security, and better access to social rights for all, including social housing, public education and subsidized medicine.
DSA would be well-advised to study FA’s base-building techniques and how it has created deep inroads with the labor movement in particular, as well as how it has fostered an organizational atmosphere marked by respectful internal political competition combined with iron-clad outward-facing external unity. The 53-year history of the FA has clearly shown us that coherent, successful democratic socialist political projects even in small countries can become important political guideposts for socialists in the Americas and beyond.