The Declining Broad Front

Uruguay’s historic Broad Front, a progressive “coalition party,” has governed for three terms since 2004 and enjoys majority control of the legislature. However, in the most recent first-round elections, its vote share dropped nearly 9 percent in comparison with its 2014 performance.

The Broad Front saw important losses in the country’s hinterland, where the same electorate had delivered a resounding victory in 2014. This slump has several explanations: a presidential campaign heavily focused on Montevideo, the nation’s capital; a failure to adequately deal with economic stagnation; and the growing impact of a law-and-order, security-obsessed rhetoric, reflected most clearly in the near passage of the “Vivir Sin Miedo” bill (perhaps not coincidentally, with strongest support in the areas bordering on Brazil).

The topic of “security” has shot to the top of the public agenda in a way that few could have anticipated, in a nation that, relative to its South American neighbors, has been little afflicted by violence. But the issue, expressed in the “Vivir Sin Miedo” reforms, continues to cast a long shadow over the elections. And while no major presidential candidate officially supports the bill, there was a strong correlation between votes for the three leading right-wing parties and support for the measure.

The security issue indeed proved decisive and played heavily into the hands of the conservative opposition during the first round of the election. This, in addition to an economic downturn that, though nowhere near as severe as in neighboring Argentina or Brazil, has hit the middle-class sector especially hard, will be a determining factor in the November 24 runoff.

The Opposition

The Broad Front’s main rival is the National Party (PN). Although PN candidate Luis Lacalle Pou did relatively poorly in October’s election, the National Party’s strategy has long been to form a right-wing coalition for the second round, incorporating the far-right Open Cabildo (CA) and the People’s Party into the fold, along with more traditional center-right parties like the Colorado Party and the Independent Party.

This strategy has so far proven to be an unqualified success in electoral terms, but the more traditional right-wing parties may be playing with fire in legitimizing far-right tendencies. From the outset, it has naturalized a future coalition with the CA and the extreme right. Attempts by other coalition members, such as the Colorado Party, to distance themselves from the far right of the coalition are largely gestural, given the important lift they have received through this arrangement.

In Europe, politics has in the last several decades seen a tacit agreement between right, left and the center on one key issue: the ultra-right should be marginalized and co-governance ruled out.

In Uruguay, no such agreement exists. The Executive Committee of the traditional Colorado Party gave a warm welcoming to the National Party’s Lacalle Pou. In so doing, it effectively gifted the second-place challenger spot to the National Party and at the same time opened the door to the far-right Open Cabildo.

In a word, the Colorado Party, the historic Uruguayan “party of government,” has hitched its wagon to its own rivals. In the name of defeating the Broad Front, it has surrendered any autonomous initiative and enabled the rise of the far right.

Open Cabildo and Guido Manini Ríos

In the first-round election, Open Cabildo — which embraces a militarism and the most reactionary core of the anti–Broad Front opposition — won an impressive 11 percent of the vote share. Such a victory for the far right is an unprecedented result in Uruguayan political history.

It is most likely that some portion of that vote comes from the social base that formerly supported the Broad Front’s wildly popular José “Pepe” Mujica. The far-right Open Cabildo made its electoral debut with a populist discourse that has since reaped positive results: its growth appears to follow a parallel decline not only of the Broad Front, but also more traditional parties.

Meanwhile, traditional parties like the Colorado Party, who should be alarmed that the rise of the far right could spell their own decline, has instead been blinded by its obsession with removing the Broad Front from power.

Although the Open Cabildo was formally created in February 2019, its official founder acted as the government notary for the Broad Front administration.

Curiously, CA presidential candidate Guido Manini Ríos had, until as recently as March 2019, occupied the position of chief commander of the armed forces under the last two Broad Front governments. Stranger still, he was appointed by the Broad Front Defense Minister Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, a former member of the Tupamaros guerilla group.

In his five years as chief commander, Guido Manini Ríos violated constitutional and institutional norms with regularity until, at last, in March 2019, President Tabaré Vasquéz removed him from his post. The timing of his removal suited Manini Ríos perfectly: he departed as the victim of what many felt was a persecutory campaign against the unfairly maligned military institution. Days later, he accepted the offer to run as the presidential candidate for the recently formed Open Cabildo.

Manini Ríos may not be as brash as Bolsonaro or the leaders of Vox in Spain, but he does not shrink from embracing openly extremist positions. He has made little effort to conceal his positive assessment of Uruguay’s former civilian-military dictatorship. Several CA candidates are former members of the Juventud Uruguaya de Pie, an extreme-right group with paramilitary connections, active in the early 1970s.

His personality has become a magnet on the campaign trail for philo-Nazi youth groups, and when he delves into his past, he speaks glowingly of his former military career in 1972, conveniently eliding his activities during the dictatorship.

In terms of ideology, Manini Ríos’s success is similar to that of other far-right figures around the globe. An opponent of liberal free-market policies, he presents himself as a patriot in the fight against globalization, going so far as to employ anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchic rhetoric. Socially, Manini Ríos is an ultra-Catholic and a strong partisan in the war against the “gender ideology.”

The outstanding question is whether the far right — key to the mainstream right’s electoral success — can be assimilated into a stable governing administration. Open Cabildo is still operating within the strictures of the democratic process. But its declared position on certain key issues — its refusal to repudiate the military dictatorship and its resistance to investigations of state-sponsored terrorism — makes it an undeniably dangerous bedfellow for the Nationals. Such intransigence begs the question of whether such a reactionary partner can be “normalized” by its more liberal companions.

Questions also remain over who exactly makes up the natural social base of Open Cabildo. Many are certainly from Uruguay’s popular classes and are attracted by Manini’s strongman approach to law and order. But the ascent of the far right in Uruguay also reflects a broader continental disenchantment with democracy, the political process, and a rehabilitated image of the long-discredited armed forces.

On the Eve of the Runoff

The year 2019 was without a doubt a bad one for the Broad Front. Leaving aside its poor performance in the first-round general elections, an enormous popular manifestation against the “Vivir Sin Miedo” bill was largely untapped by the progressive party.

The Broad Front’s post-first-round campaign has also been marked by gaffs and a lack of coordination. Its candidate Daniel Martínez performed poorly in televised debates with his principle opponent from the PN, Lacalle Pou, and attempts to make overtures to the base of traditional parties has largely backfired.

The Broad Front must be clear about the sectors it will need to prioritize in order to resume party growth. Part of that will mean recovering disaffected sectors of its own base, which means it will need to seriously assess the results from the first-round elections. There is a large portion of the Uruguayan electorate that, rightly or wrongly, is deeply dissatisfied with the Broad Front’s third term.

Secondly, the Broad Front must make an appeal to the base of adversary parties (traditional as well as newer, smaller parties) who will be instinctively averse to extreme right-wing politics.

In an important sense, the Broad Front is at a crossroads with the very same progressive society it helped to foster. The party’s centrist drift on key issues is increasingly at odds with a society that is now much stronger on key social areas than it was when the Broad Front first took power in 2004: organized labor is stronger than ever, gender equality and new social rights have been widely embraced, and civil society in general is more mobilized than ever.

Lacalle Pou of the National Party is without a doubt the favorite to win the runoff elections, but the contest is still open. Uruguay’s traditional parties — the Blancos and Colorados — seem blind to the fact that they have placed their own parties’ future in jeopardy by throwing all their weight behind the far right in an effort to defeat the Broad Front. Such short-termism could spell disaster in the future.

Uruguay, regularly rated as Latin America’s most prosperous, progressive, and stable nation, may actually be in need of change, and the Broad Front alone might not be capable of accomplishing it. But the nation’s traditional parties would do well to see that, with or without the Broad Front, some changes are beyond the pale, and naturalizing an ascendant far right is less a solution than it is a capitulation.