Ballot 2024: Yamandú Orsi and Álvaro Delgado before the date of their lives (politics)

The cards are already played. Yamandu Orsi and Alvaro Delgado They have done everything they could do – or what they decided to do – to reach the Presidency of the Republic. Now we just have to wait.

There will be movements until the last moment, of course, because in politics you fight for votes until the end. There remains that 8% of undecided people that disturbs more than one in the Broad Front (FA) and in the National Party (PN), but the bulk of the political moves, the defining ones, have already occurred.

Orsi and Delgado arrive at this runoff, the most even in 30 years, with an extensive electoral campaign that failed to catch on with the electorate. We are not going to return to this topic now, but apathy towards politics is a sign of this time.

The unprecedented scenario of a tie forced the two candidates to downgrade, moderate their attacks on their rival and maintain a certain rectitude so as not to instill tensions that would affect the development of the election and the scrutinywhich could extend until the count of the last observed voteaccording to some public opinion experts.

Nobody wants a scenario like the one five years ago, when Daniel Martinez decided to wait for the total vote count considering that the advantage of Luis Lacalle Pou It was minimal. The counting took four days until – without the work of the Electoral Court– the Frente Amplista admitted defeat. In that election, however, there was a key factor that does not seem to be repeated this time: the electoral participation It was a record and 90% of eligible Uruguayans voted.

“The results will be available on Sunday night. It is unlikely that that will happen again,” they trust on Delgado’s side. Despite being second, they prefer to avoid bureaucratization of the political definition (at least for now).

Instead, they place their expectations in the rural interior and in that “silent majority”, as the white candidate baptized her. As an example of what is moving without attracting attention, they say that PN voters who come from Argentina They are not counted in ships or buses. “They are arriving by car. People who did not vote in October,” they clarify.

Orsi vastly surpassed Delgado in the first round. The Frente Amplio is the majority political force of the Uruguaythat is why the Coalition was reissued, leading to this tie scenario.

On the side of the former mayor of Canelones they have no doubts. “We are going to win. It will be by 3% or by one, but we won,” they say, echoing the minimum and maximum difference that the last polls published before the ban showed. “Of course, it is a breech birth,” they admit with resignation.

In any case, Uruguayan institutions, as valued as the attractiveness of the country brand, will have a new opportunity to show how robust its state is. Uruguayans, even the most apathetic, have a date with civility this Sunday; Orsi and Delgado, with the future of politics.