Uruguay’s general elections on Oct. 27 (first round) and Nov. 24 (runoff) will usher in a new government in March 2025 – along with new challenges due to the fragmented parliamentary outcome. In the Senate, the center-left Frente Amplio party secured a majority but fell two seats short of a majority in the House. The center-right Coalición Republicana, comprising four independently competing parties (Partido Nacional, Partido Colorado, Partido Independiente, and Cabildo Abierto), also fell short of a collective majority in the House, by one seat. A new outsider party, Identidad Soberana – an anti-vaccination, extremist, and unaligned group – secured the remaining two House seats.
In the Nov. 24, 2024, presidential runoff, Frente Amplio candidate Yamandú Orsi emerged victorious with 49.84% of the vote, narrowly defeating Coalición Republicana candidate Álvaro Delgado, who garnered 45.87%. Under Uruguay’s constitutional rules, Orsi will now serve as president for one term, from 2025 to 2029. [These same rules prevented incumbent President Luis Lacalle Pou from running for a second consecutive term.]
What led to Uruguay’s fragmented election results?
The first round of elections determined the composition of Uruguay’s next parliament, with all members of the two chambers – House and Senate – elected based on proportional representation under the D’Hondt method. The system is designed to ensure identical majorities in both chambers and Uruguay does not hold midterm elections. However, the fragmented outcome presents significant challenges, with Frente Amplio holding a slight majority in the Senate and no party or bloc holding a majority in the House. Uruguay can now expect five years of intense negotiations to secure support for any legislation.
The Uruguayan policy mood generally falls on the liberal side of the continuum but has had thermostatic pendulum-like movements during the last three decades. The 2019 election had marked the end of a 15-year Frente Amplio rule. Many observers saw the pendulum shifting towards a more conservative mood or at least a plateau phase. While the 2024 election will replace the incumbent center-right governing coalition with a center-left government, here are two signs that this election does not significantly change the policy mood. First, the first-round vote tally between center-right (48%) and center-left (44%) parties suggests relatively equal support for both positions. Second, neither plebiscite on this year’s ballot – on pensions and overnight crackdowns – reached the 50% mark. This was a strong signal that Uruguayans were not in the mood for big policy changes in two sensitive sectors.
New parties received only 2.7% of the 2024 vote – 2 of 99 seats in the House and none in the Senate. That’s another sign that voters were not keen on change: In the 2019 general election, in contrast, new parties claimed 14% of the first-round votes, winning 13 of 99 House seats and 3 of 31 in the Senate. The fact that 91% of votes in this year’s election went to incumbent parties suggests that Uruguayans trusted their traditional parties to address citizen demands.
This election marked the sixth cycle since Uruguay’s 1996 political reforms, which replaced a one-round presidential election system with multiple intra-party candidacies and relative majority rules with a two-round system requiring a simple majority in the runoff. Since the mid-1990s, two political blocs have steadily consolidated. To the left of center is the Frente Amplio, a labor-oriented, programmatic party that governed Uruguay for three election cycles, from 2005 to 2019. To the right of center is Coalición Republicana – the incumbent electoral coalition of four parties – and the bloc that was just voted out.
Challenges facing Uruguay’s next government
Uruguay has enjoyed a stable democracy and enviable socioeconomic development over the past two decades. Nonetheless, Uruguay faces at least three critical challenges in the coming years.
Security is a top concern for political leaders – and the public. The rise of drug trafficking in the Southern Cone has exacerbated micro-trafficking within Uruguay, increasing crime rates – particularly homicides – and contributing to the entrenchment of organized crime, including potential state infiltration. Uruguay’s response has focused on boosting the incarceration of drug traffickers and improving policing through targeted strategies and technological advancements. However, these crime prevention measures have largely failed to address higher levels of the narcotrafficking hierarchy.
Education is a critical unresolved issue. Around half of Uruguayans aged 20 to 24 have not completed their secondary education. This reflects a long-term inability to compromise between the two political blocs and teaching unions on launching effective strategies to improve educational outcomes. Increasing the number of Uruguayans who complete secondary school would strengthen democratic support and economic development.
A key concern is that lower education levels will hinder Uruguay’s incorporation into the knowledge economy, which is crucial for addressing pressing issues like automation, skill-biased technological change, and increasing value-added exports. During the last year of the Lacalle Pou administration, all parties began deep discussions on a national plan to eradicate child poverty, which hampers efforts to boost secondary education down the road. For the incoming parliament, goals like education and child poverty will likely be a prime area of accord between parties.
Economic sustainability is an enduring challenge for a country that prizes its social welfare structure. Like other developed economies, Uruguay juggles growth projections and the economic demands of sustaining its social protection system. Key to this process is effective dialogue between politicians, employers, and organized labor to advance strategies to boost economic growth and spend more efficiently on social welfare. Uruguay has a semi-centralized wage-bargaining system through which employers and labor groups can coordinate sector-specific actions to boost employment, advance skill acquisition, and dynamize economic activity within specific sectors. Recent centralized wage bargaining experiences in northern and continental Europe – such as the cases of the Netherlands and Norway – may shed light on specific policies Uruguay might pursue to boost productivity. Child poverty, high dropout rates during middle school, and high youth unemployment are signs that Uruguay needs to take a closer look at the structure of the welfare state. One major challenge, for example, will be using public subsidies more effectively to promote skill upgrading – and decrease youth unemployment. These issues may also help the government’s ongoing efforts to attract foreign investors and open new export markets.
The new parliament’s political challenges
To avoid gridlock, Uruguay’s divided parliament will require consensus-building across parties. Political polarization in Uruguay has not devolved into affective polarization, or the tendency for partisans to view members of the opposing group negatively on a personal level. This is a promising sign of healthy democratic competition, but it remains uncertain whether this environment will enable meaningful collaboration on Uruguay’s security, education, and economic challenges. The new political map will allow for few inter-party accords, so these efforts will require careful crafting to advance policy changes in some of these critical areas.
The period leading up to Orsi’s inauguration on March 1, 2025, will be critical for negotiations within the newly elected parliament as the Frente Amplio and the opposition parties begin to shape the country’s legislative and policy agenda. On the one hand, it is uncertain whether the Coalición Republicana will remain a monolithic opposition bloc, mostly because the minor partners with at least two seats in the House – Partido Colorado and Cabildo Abierto – may find it more profitable to sit at the table with Frente Amplio to secure majorities for projects of their preference. Any legislative wins for the new parties would boost their visibility and support base for the next electoral cycle in 2029.
On the other hand, striking deals with opposition parties would require Frente Amplio to reach internal accords within its factions to accommodate party preferences. Overall, the political trade-off between the need for consensus building and the need for delivering policy changes in the three areas discussed above (and others) could put Frente Amplio between a rock and a hard place.
In a global scenario where adapting to rapidly changing environments is the rule and incumbent parties find it particularly tough to secure reelection, Orsi and Frente Amplio have a hard road ahead. Uruguay, in turn, faces important developmental challenges that may test the political system’s dialogue and consensus-building tradition. Uruguayans expect politicians to perform and deliver now that the election is over.
Juan Bogliaccini is a professor of political science at Universidad Católica del Uruguay (UCU). He is the author of “Twittarquía: la política de las redes en Uruguay” (Universidad Católica Press, 2019), “Empowering Labor: Leftist Approaches to Wage Policy in Unequal Democracies” (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and “Skills, Values and Development” (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
