The party leader, Guido Manini Ríos, said that they sought a margin of rejection of signatures of more than 10%.
The match of the Multicolor Coalition seeks to take its debtors’ plebiscite to the departmental elections of 2025 with a total of 320,000 signatures, after not having obtained enough signatures to be voted on in this year’s presidential elections.
In May of this year, the leader of Open Town Hall, Guido Manini Riosannounced that they had reached 312,825 signatures, but that this number did not give them the assurance that they could validate the more than 275,000 signatures needed to hold a plebiscite, that is, 10% of the electoral roll.
In this way, they continued their path in search of even more adhesions until they achieved a total of 320,000 signatures, which gives them the assurance of having a 10% probability of rejection by the Electoral Court, although they have not yet reached 20%. On the other hand, as confirmed to El Observador, the leader of the party announced that they will present the signatures on November 11 to be validated by the state body, and to be able to reach the departmental elections of May 2025.
What is the aim of the Cabildo Abierto plebiscite?
Town meeting launched his plebiscite last year after failing in the Parliament a bill along the same lines. The party’s argument, criticised by The National Partysectors of the Broad Front and the banking sectoris that there are “hundreds of thousands of Uruguayans who today are considered irrecoverable debtors” as a result of the interest charged by financial institutions.
Basically, the initiative aims to modify article 52 of the Constitution to establish the “prohibition of usury” and set “the maximum interest for all purposes in a Annual Effective Rate 30% on amounts converted to Indexed Units (IU)“. It also sets out penalties for “violators” of the measures and adds that “no one may be deprived of their freedom for debt.”
In Uruguay there are more than 700,000 people classified as debtors with difficulty in their ability to pay, according to the Credit Risk Center (CRC) of the BCU, which, as of May 2023, had 1,905,155 people in the country registered as debtors.
Source: Ambito
