Yamandú Orsi became the third left-wing president in the history of Uruguay on Sunday and will succeed Luis Lacalle Pou, of the conservative National Party, on March 1, 2025.
40 years after the first elections after the civil-military dictatorship that Uruguay experienced between 1973 and 1985 and 20 years after the first victory of Tabaré Vázquez, the Frente Amplio will return to the government of this South American country in the hands of a politician member of the sector led by José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, who also served as head of state twice.
A history teacher, he is the son of a seamstress and a farmer. Yamandú Ramón Antonio Orsi Martínez was born in the capital of the Uruguayan department (province) of Canelones on June 13, 1967, the day the country recorded one of the worst frosts of the century, and he lived his early years “in the countryside” . (as it is generally called in Uruguay under the name of rural areas).
There, his father was dedicated to selling grapes to the wineries, but everything changed when he was five years old, when the “old man” was diagnosed with a herniated disc and the family had to move to the city, where they opened a warehouse.
Folk dancing was an extracurricular activity when Orsi was studying in high school and he, a lover of popular singing and Uruguayan folklore by artists such as Los Zucará, Alfredo Zitarrosa or Santiago Chalar, found there a youthful passion with which he won a competition and continued practicing for 11 years.
During the dictatorship, attracted by figures like “Che” Guevara, he began to take an interest in politics. After experiencing the excitement of the democratic reopening of 1985, Orsi began serving in the ranks of the Frente Amplistas.
Shortly before his affiliation in 1989 with the Popular Participation Movement (MPP), created that year by “Pepe” Mujica and other former guerrillas of the National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros, he had begun a career in international relations that in one month it changed to teaching History.
Alongside working in the warehouse, during his third year of study in Montevideo he began giving classes, getting down from his chair on the teaching platform to stand alongside the students. “It was a whole new wave (…), we broke with this pattern of the professor up there,” he declared in an interview.
After his first marriage, the current winning presidential candidate met Laura Alonsopérez in the 2000s, with whom he married and in 2012 he had his twins Lucía and Victorio.
Secretary of the municipality of Canelones during the two mandates of the Front Broad Marcos Carámbula, in 2015 he was elected to succeed him as mayor, a position he held several times and in which he would have remained until 2025 without the fact that on March 1, 2024, he resigned to run as a presidential candidate.
Last Wednesday, closing the electoral campaign in the town of Las Piedras, he outlined the vision of what he would like to do if he came to power.
“Next Sunday, we will have to decide between two projects. I am not going to stop at the diagnosis of what is happening to us today, but our project, our idea, our proposals fundamentally pass through the land of certainties, through the project of certainty”, a concept which for him means that in The country continues to invest to grow.
“I want to be president of Uruguay. I went there just for that, without thinking about other projects. There’s only one and that’s where I’m headed. “I will be an activist all my life and I will always participate in political activity,” he declared this Sunday while going to the early polls.
And last night he became the new president after winning the second round of elections that made him the third left-wing president in Uruguay’s history.
