Leftists Win Power In Uruguay For First Time

by Diana Cariboni

(IPS) MONTEVIDEO -- For the first time in the history of Uruguay, the left -- a coalition of parties created 33 years ago -- won the national elections amidst a festive but tranquil climate in this South American country, which has a strong civic culture.

According to the first partial result, the Broad Front, whose name has expanded with the incorporation of new sectors to "Encuentro Progresista-Frente Amplio-Nueva Mayoría" (EP-FA-NM), garnered at least 50 percent of the vote, thus making a second round in November unnecessary.

National Party candidate Jorge Larraoaga took more than 30 percent of the vote, and Colorado Party candidate Guillermo Stirling approximately 10 percent.

The new administration to be headed by socialist candidate Tabare Vazquez, a 64-year-old oncologist, as of March 2005 will be the first leftist government in this South American country of 3.3 million, and the only one to enjoy a majority in parliament since 1966.

Vazquez travelled to Washington to assure the International Monetary Fund that they planned to honor Uruguay's bulky foreign debt and maintain macroeconomic equilibrium.

The markets reacted favorably. There have been no bank runs or capital flight in the past few months, and the peso even appreciated against the dollar.

The Broad Front was founded in 1971 by socialists, communists, left-leaning Christian democrats and politicians who left the two traditional parties that have dominated the political life of the country since it became an independent nation in 1825.

But much has changed in 33 years. For starters, the most popular sector within the Broad Front today is the Popular Participation Movement (MPP) led by former Tupamaro urban guerrillas, who observed with skepticism the creation of the alliance in 1971, and did not take part.

In fact, to a large extent the Broad Front was created as a political alternative to the Tupamaro insurgency, which was active since the early 1960s, and to a bi-party system that was cracking under the social tension, aggravated by the broader context of the Cold War.

But on Sunday, the party list of the former Tupamaro leaders, who now form part of the Broad Front, won more votes than the entire ruling Colorado Party. And the ex-guerrillas now talk about practising "responsible capitalism" while they prepare to help govern.

In the elections of 1971, in which the Broad Front took 18 percent of the vote, the leftist alliance proposed economic planning, the nationalization of the banking system and of the large foreign trade companies, agrarian reform and the elimination of the latifundium (large landed estates), and radical reforms of the tax regime.

"What our Front is proposing is not only a profound change in the structures, but the replacement of the classes that are in power, by displacing the oligarchy from power and bringing the people to govern," Líber Seregni, a founder and long-time leader of the Broad Front who died last August, said in February 1971.

Land reform and the nationalization of the banks disappeared from the Broad Front platform in the mid-1990s. Today, the coalition proposes action along five major lines: social policies, strengthening production, fostering R&D in science and technology, deepening democracy and the transparency of the State, and consolidating regional integration.

But attempts to include in the coalition's platform positions like rejection of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) -- a proposed hemisphere-wide trade bloc -- reforms of the amnesty law that let those guilty of human rights crimes during the 1973-1985 dictatorship off the hook, and refusal to pay the foreign debt were not successful.

"The version of socialism that can be seen in the Broad Front is actually fairly close to the old social democratic paradigm, although in a more left-leaning version than the western European model," say political scientists Adolfo Garce and Jaime Yaffe in their book "The Progressive Era."

The Broad Front emerged from the U.S.-backed dictatorship, which imprisoned, tortured and exiled its members in an attempt to destroy it, with a new political identity, shaped by the years of persecution and resistance, and with its defense of basic human rights and freedoms reinforced.

After the return to democracy in 1985, the Marxist sectors within the Broad Front reacted in different ways to the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist bloc, a phenomenon that had an impact on the leftist alliance's basic conceptions.

But support for the Broad Front, which has grown steadily at the polls since it was first created, did not stop growing.

"What did the left care about the most in the 1940s? Social change," political analyst Jorge Lanzaro, the founder of the Political Science Institute at the University of the Republic, told IPS.

"In the 1960s and 1970s it began to be more concerned with becoming a party capable of winning votes at the polls, and that aim took on increasing importance, which turned (the alliance) more and more into an electoral party, while its ideology gradually adapted to that dynamic," he added.

The left thus began to expand, and to "compete" for votes at the centre of the political spectrum. "It did not lose its identity, but its positions became more moderate in order to reach a broader electorate," said Lanzaro, who coordinated production of the book "The Uruguayan Left: Between Opposition and the Government," a collective body of work.

A polarization between the left and the right, which did not exist in the old party system, emerged in the 1990s, while the Broad Front capitalised on the deep-rooted Uruguayan sentiments in favour of a strong state and against laissez-faire economic policies.

"However, the left has not been impermeable to the neo-liberal cultural revolution, and has incorporated some of its elements, like the need for fiscal balance, the opening up of trade, and increased competitiveness," said Lanzaro.

In this campaign, the left put a strong emphasis on calming the financial markets and business sector, announcing far ahead of the elections the name of the future economy minister: Senator Danilo Astori, a prestigious Broad Front economist who has a reputation as a moderate.

Support for the leftist coalition began to take off with the recession of the late 1990s that culminated in the profound economic crisis of 2002, the worst in Uruguayan history.

In this country that was once known as the Switzerland of Latin America, one million out of 3.3 million people are now living in poverty, and the foreign debt is equivalent to 105 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). More than half of all children are living in households that have fallen below the poverty line.

Economic activity did recover significantly this year and unemployment fell from 20 to 13 percent. But wages have not rallied, and many of the working poor do not earn a living wage, while the gap between rich and poor has widened, and tens of thousands of Uruguayans have left the country, seeking better opportunities abroad.

The current Colorado Party administration of President Jorge Batlle is one of the most unpopular governments in Latin America today.

Discontent with the traditional parties has grown enormously since 2002. That is especially true in the case of the conservative Colorado Party, which has governed Uruguay for most of its life as an independent republic, and which built the country's strong welfare state in the first half of the 20th century.

At the same time, neighboring South American countries have begun to turn away from the free-market policies, structural adjustment progams and privatization that were all the rage in the 1990s.

Powerful countries like Argentina and Brazil have recently swung to the left, and even the multilateral financial institutions have begun to acknowledge the damages that neo-liberal policies have caused in the region.

These policies have also been seriously questioned in Venezuela and Bolivia as well.

Against that backdrop, a leftist coalition that survived 33 years, including a 12-year de facto military regime, and grew until winning power at the polls is now facing a unique opportunity to live up to the hopes for social justice and in-depth change shared by its supporters.

"The Broad Front is an enormous popular party that you could say is now assuming the place held by the Colorado Party in the 20th century, and that will surely occupy it for a long time to come," predicted Lanzaro.