In a year of landmark elections, my country’s presidential vote last month flew under the radar. And perhaps with good reason: Uruguay’s balloting was marked by unexciting candidates and their lackluster attempts to entice undecided voters to the polls. In the end, no candidate won a majority, leaving weary Uruguayans to brace for another round of unimpressive speeches leading up to a runoff on Sunday.
It’s out of character for Uruguay to have such a boring political season. For as long as I can remember, elections here have been a spectacle, with balconies draped in political flags and spirited debates in the streets. Memories of life under a brutal dictatorship late last century have nourished our enthusiasm for democracy and the peaceful transfer of power between the right and left. Over four decades, this has been our superpower, rendering our nation of 3.4 million a politically stable oasis in a tumultuous part of the world. An uneventful vote seems preferable to the deep polarization that has surrounded presidential elections over the past year in countries like El Salvador, Argentina, Venezuela and even the United States.
But underneath our staid election lies an urgent problem: Young people here feel increasingly left behind, despite Uruguay’s reputation as a beacon of economic and social success. That’s potentially bad news for one of the strongest democracies in Latin America: In a 2023 Latinobarómetro poll, 38 percent of the young people surveyed said they’d be fine giving up democracy for a government that could solve their problems.
And young Uruguayans are afflicted by many problems. The country has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Latin America, at 26 percent in 2023, compared with Argentina’s 18 percent the same year. Uruguay has elevated high school dropout rates. Young people are disproportionately affected by food insecurity and high imprisonment rates, with one in five children and adolescents living in poverty and 45 percent of the prison population under 30. As it did in other countries, the Covid-19 pandemic left Uruguay in the grip of a mental-health crisis that hit this group hard. In recent years, suicide was one of the leading causes of death among young people.
All of this has translated into political apathy among marginalized young voters. But older generations also show dissatisfaction, voicing considerable disappointment in the government’s handling of childhood poverty, the high cost of living, corruption and rising crime rates. Although the inflation rate has slowed, net public debt rose, and there have been high-profile cases of mismanagement of public funds and corruption in President Luis Lacalle Pou’s administration.
Before the first round of elections, I spoke with a handful of undecided young voters in the capital, Montevideo, all of whom were casting ballots for the first or second time. Some said that the presidential candidates who made it to Sunday’s runoff — Yamandú Orsi of the leftist Broad Front, and Álvaro Delgado of President Lacalle Pou’s center-right National Party — seemed distant, out of touch and difficult to understand.
Though the two candidates come from different ideological camps, both have said they will seek to combat childhood poverty and offer rehabilitation programs for incarcerated people. Mr. Orsi proposes a community-oriented crime prevention approach that addresses the social aspects of criminal involvement, while Mr. Delgado promises to be tougher on crime and build a maximum-security prison.
Uruguay is politically divided, but it’s not yet polarized. The struggle does not reach the levels of fury and online fervor as we saw with Argentina’s president, Javier Milei. The closest thing to a far right-wing movement like the one led by Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro is a small right-wing party that has been steadily losing support. Uruguay’s political problems are far from Venezuela’s election fraud, Donald Trump’s attacks on American institutions or Nayib Bukele’s iron fist in El Salvador.
Whoever prevails on Sunday, the political parties must champion upward mobility for the nation’s youth. To overcome future disenchantment, the system must help them grow through accessible education and quality jobs. Or else Uruguay’s future elections may be considerably less boring, and not in a positive way.
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