Left-wing candidate Yamandu Orsi used to be projected to win Uruguay’s presidential election, media reported Sunday, in a scold through citizens of 5 years of conservative rule.
Uruguayans going to the polls for the second one around of balloting in what changed into a decent race between Orsi, of the Frente Amplio (Extensive Entrance) alliance, and Alvaro Delgado of the Nationwide Celebration, a member of outgoing President Luis Lacalle Pou´s centre-right Republican Coalition.
Orsi won 49 % of the vote to Delgado’s 46.6 %, consistent with an Equipos Consultores ballot carried through TV station Canal 10, occasion the leftist flesh presser used to be projected to have 49.5 % of the vote in opposition to 45.9 % for his opponent in a Cifra ballot cited through Canal 12.
Orsi’s marketing campaign used to be boosted through backup from Jose “Pepe” Mujica, a former guerrilla lionized as “the world’s poorest president” as a result of his tiny way of life right through his 2010-2015 month in workplace.
Orsi, detectable as an understudy of Mujica, had garnered 43.9 % of the October 27 first-round vote — decrease of the 50 % had to steer clear of a runoff however forward of the 26.7 % of ballots solid for Delgado.
The pair got here out on manage of a crowded garden of eleven applicants searching for to switch Lacalle Pou, who has a prime goodwill score however is barred constitutionally from searching for a moment consecutive time period.
Polls had pointed to a slender race Sunday, with Orsi most effective marginally forward in mentioned voter aim in South The united states’s second-smallest nation.
Polls closed at 7:30 pm (2230 GMT).
An excessively other global
Mujica, who’s struggling with most cancers and needed to worth a cane to go into his polling station to vote, mentioned Sunday: “I have nothing more to look forward to. My closest future is the cemetery, for reasons of age.
“However I’m within the destiny of you, the younger nation who, when they’re my day, will are living in an excessively other global.”
A smiling Orsi cast his ballot Sunday in the rural Canelones region, to applause from supporters.
Delgado shook hands with polling station officials as he cast his vote in Montevideo.
“If I win, the next day I plan to ask candidate Orsi to come back to have some mate,” Delgado said, referring to a traditional herbal infusion Uruguayans sip frequently.
Other parties within the Republican Coalition had thrown their support behind Delgado since the first round, boosting his numbers.
Insecurity a worry
A victory for Orsi will see Uruguay swing left again after five years of centre-right rule in the country of 3.4 million inhabitants.
The Frente Amplio coalition broke a decades-long conservative stranglehold with an election victory in 2005 and held the presidency for three straight terms.
It was voted out in 2020 on the back of concerns about rising crime blamed on high taxes and a surge in cocaine trafficking through the port of Montevideo.
Polling numbers ahead of the vote showed that perceived insecurity remains Uruguayans’ top concern five years later.
A 72-year-old retiree who voted, Juan Antonio Stivan, said he just wanted the next government to guarantee “protection — so that you could journey out on the street with sleep of thoughts, as an worn individual, as a teenager, as a kid.”
Another voter, Aldo Soroara, a 60-year-old winegrower, said he expected whoever is elected as president to do “the most productive he can for the nation,” adding: “You’ll be able to’t ask for a lot more in those tough instances.”
Vote casting is obligatory in Uruguay, one in all Latin The united states’s maximum strong democracies, with relatively prime per-capita source of revenue and occasional poverty ranges.
Right through the heyday of leftist rule, Uruguay legalized abortion and same-sex marriage, changed into the primary Latin American nation to restrain smoking in family playgrounds and the sector’s first family, in 2013, to permit leisure hashish worth.
