Orsi, the leader of the Uruguayan left who picks up the thread of José Mujica and Tabaré Vázquez as president of the country

Yamandú Orsi became the third left-wing president in the history of Uruguay this Sunday and will succeed Luis Lacalle Pou, from the conservative National Party, on March 1, 2025.

40 years after the first election after the civil-military dictatorship that Uruguay experienced in the period 1973-1985 and 20 years after the first victory of Tabaré Vázquez, the Frente Amplio will return to the Government in the South American country at the hands of a politician who is a member of the sector headed by José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, who was also head of state on two occasions.

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 first years “in the countryside” (as It is usually referred to in Uruguay as 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 dance was an extracurricular activity when Orsi was studying at high school and he, fond of popular singing and Uruguayan folklore by artists such as Los Zucará, Alfredo Zitarrosa or Santiago Chalar, found in it 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 become interested in politics. After experiencing the ebullience of the democratic reopening of 1985, Orsi began to serve in the ranks of the Frente Amplistas.

Shortly before his affiliation in 1989 to 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 a month he changed to teaching. of History.

In parallel with working in the warehouse, in his third year of studies in Montevideo he began teaching classes, with the gesture of getting down from his chair on the teaching platform to stand alongside the students. “It was a whole new wave (…), we broke with that scheme of the professor up there,” he said in an interview.

After his first marriage, the current winning presidential candidate met Laura Alonsopérez in the 2000s, whom he married and in 2012 he had his twin children Lucía and Victorio.

Secretary of the Municipality of Canelones during the two terms of the Broad Front Marcos Carámbula, in 2015 he was elected to succeed him as mayor, a position he held on several occasions and in which he would have remained until 2025 if it had not been for the fact that on March 1, 2024 he resigned. to launch himself as a presidential candidate.

Last Wednesday, when closing the electoral campaign in the city of Las Piedras, he outlined the vision of what he would want 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 go through the land of certainties, through the project of certainty”, a concept that for him means that in the country continues investing to grow.

“I want to be president of Uruguay. I went just for that without thinking about other plans. There is only one and that is what I am going towards. “I am going to be a militant all my life and I am always going to participate in political activity,” he declared this Sunday when he went early to vote.

And at night he became the new president after winning the second round of the elections that made him the third left-wing president in the history of Uruguay.