Left-wing opposition candidate wins tight presidential election in Uruguay

Even as the vote count continued, Álvaro Delgado, the presidential candidate of the center-right ruling coalition, conceded defeat to his challenger.

“With sadness, but without guilt, we can congratulate the winner,” he told supporters at his campaign headquarters in the capital of Montevideo

Fireworks erupted over the stage where Orsi, 57, a working-class former history teacher and two-time mayor from Uruguay’s Broad Front coalition, thanked his supporters as crowds flocked to greet him.

“The country of liberty, equality and fraternity has triumphed once again,” he said, vowing to unite the nation of 3.4 million people after such a tight vote.

“Let’s understand that there is another part of our country who have different feelings today,” he said. “These people will also have to help build a better country. We need them too.”

With nearly all the votes counted, electoral officials reported that Orsi won just over 49% of the vote, ahead of Delgado’s 46%. The rest cast blank votes or abstained in defiance of Uruguay’s enforced compulsory voting. Turnout reached almost 90%.

While failing to entice apathetic young voters, Uruguay’s lackluster electoral campaigns steered clear of the anti-establishment fury that has vaulted populist outsiders to power elsewhere in the world, like in the United States and neighboring Argentina.

After weeks in which the moderate rivals appeared tied in the polls, Delgado’s concession ushers in Orsi as Uruguay’s new leader and cuts short the center-right Republican coalition’s shot at governing. The 2019 election of President Luis Lacalle Pou spelled an end to 15 consecutive years of rule by the Broad Front.

“I called Yamandú Orsi to congratulate him as President-elect of our country,” Lacalle Pou wrote on social media platform X, adding that he would “put myself at his service and begin the transition as soon as I deem it appropriate.”

Orsi’s victory was the latest sign that simmering discontent over post-pandemic economic malaise favors anti-incumbent candidates. In the many elections that took place during 2024, voters frustrated with the status quo have punished ruling parties from the U.S. and Britain to South Korea and Japan.

But unlike elsewhere in the world, Orsi is a moderate with no radical plans for change. He largely agrees with his opponent on key voter concerns like driving down the childhood poverty rate, now at a staggering 25%, and containing an upsurge in organized crime that has shaken the nation long considered among Latin America’s safest.