The election campaign for Sunday’s internal elections formally comes to an end this Thursday, although the candidates burned their last cartridges yesterday to seduce an electorate reluctant to participate in the primaries.
There are 2,766,342 Uruguayans qualified by the Electoral Court to cast your vote in one of the internal partisans. But the level of stake is probably one of the biggest questions on Sunday.
Although historically electoral participation in internal elections is low (40%), the latest survey of Figure In this regard, it showed that for this occasion 6 out of every 10 Uruguayans plan to vote. Quite a change of habit if Sunday’s final numbers prove it.
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In the Frente Amplio, the order of the formula will be disputed between Yamandú Orsi and Carolina Cosse.
The main forces, the National Party (PN) and the Broad Front (FA)arrive at the electoral meeting with very different internal scenarios.
In the official force it is clear that Alvaro Delgado, former Secretary of the Presidency, will win the candidacy to compete in October. The questions focus on the conformation of the formula, an issue that has been gaining strength in recent days until it led to a certain annoyance to the candidate who yesterday proposed to the impatient “take a clonazepam.”
The phrase hides something more than exhaustion when faced with the same question “who will be the vice presidential candidate?” Delgado was not and is not convinced of completing the binomial with the economist Laura Raffo, eventual second in the internal elections.
He thought of the Minister of Economy and Finance, Azucena Arbeleche. She doesn’t want to. The chancellor was considered Omar Paganini and even measured with consultants the effect of adding to Daniel Salinas, former Minister of Health and part of Town meeting.
But the internal pressure in the National Party to emulate the recipe of the Frente Amplio and have a formula composed of the winner and the second, with the extra of being parity, imposes. So does the need for immediacy: the pairing must be known on Sunday night itself. What is at stake is to begin, with victory burning in our hands, to sow the first seeds on the way to October, this is a presidential speech, of unity, and to confront the opposition.
In the Frente Amplio, on the other hand, and although the voting intention polls position the former mayor of Cannelloni, Yamandú Orsi, As a favourite, you hold your breath until the last moment.
From the canary sector they know it and still refuse to talk about victory. The main rival of the primary on the progressive front, the mayor of Montevideo in use of license, Carolina Cosse, He compensated well for his capitalist image with an active and thorough campaign in the interior of the country. Furthermore – and this is key – the forces that rally behind his candidacy are those that organically participate in the internal elections.
What is at stake, then, in the internal elections of the Frente Amplio is the mobilization capacity of the contenders. The rest was built on public and clear rules from the beginning of the campaign: Orsi and Cosse will be in the formula. It only remains to know the order.
