A total of 2.7 million citizens are qualified to vote on Sunday in Uruguay’s internal elections, where the candidates who will seek the presidency will be chosen in the elections next October.
According to the criteria of
With 2,766,342 eligible voters, according to official data from the Electoral Court, the ballot boxes will be ready to receive, between 8:00 and 19:30 local time, the votes in the 7,105 voting circuits arranged throughout a country of three and a half million inhabitants.
Electoral dynamics Those who have registered by April 1, 2024 and are 18 years old on the date of the elections will be able to vote, the circuits of which are concentrated mainly in the departments (provinces) of Montevideo and Canelones, which will have 2,521 and 1,061 circuits, respectively.
Of the 7,105 enabled, according to the Court, 4,934 circuits will be accessible to people with disabilities, who will be able to cast their observed vote in one of these if the one they are assigned to is not, following the provisions of a law promoted after the 2019 primaries by the lawyer with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Rafael de León and approved that August.
According to the Constitution, voting in Uruguay is “secret and compulsory” both in national elections and in a possible second round.
However, primaries are the only ones in which the law that regulates them indicates that they are non-mandatory voting, so citizens – who, according to experts, would have a low participation of around 40 percent of those eligible – can choose not to express their preference at the polls.
However, from this first instance of the electoral year in the South American country governed by the center-right Luis Lacalle Pou since his inauguration on March 1, 2020, when he succeeded the late leftist former president Tabaré Vázquez (2005-2010 and 2015-2020), the names of those who will compete to receive the presidential sash on March 1, 2025 will emerge.
Photograph of the facade of a building with political propaganda, on June 27, 2024, in Montevideo.
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Who competes?
While the most prominent are the centre-right National Party and Colorado Party and the left-wing opposition coalition Frente Amplio, 15 other parties will choose their presidential candidates for October on Sunday.
These include the coalition partners of the Government Cabildo Abierto (right) and the Independent Party (centre-left), as well as the opposition Intransigent Radical Ecologist Party, which achieved parliamentary representation in 2019.
In turn, among others, the following formations are running – mostly with single candidates – the Libertarian Party, the Green Animalist Party, the Alternative Homeland Party, the Sovereign Identity Party, the Basta Ya Party, the Constitutional Environmentalist Party and the Harmony Party.
Photograph showing a booth with lists of the pre-candidate for the presidency of Uruguay for the leftist Frente Amplio, Carolina Cosse.
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In addition to the candidates, in the internal elections all parties will elect the members of their National Deliberative Bodies and their Departmental Deliberative Bodies and in order to fight in the national elections in October they are required to exceed 500 votes.
As for the pre-candidates, the force that has the most options is the PC – the one that governed the most throughout the country’s history but did not reach 13% of the votes in the 2019 national elections – with six: Andrés Ojeda , Gabriel Gurméndez, Tabaré Viera, Robert Silva, Carolina Ache and Zaida González.
They are followed by the historic National Party with five: Álvaro Delgado, Laura Raffo, Jorge Gandini, Roxana Cobran and Carlos Iafigliola and the Frente Amplio, the most voted force in 2019 and which governed for three consecutive terms between 2005 and 2020, with three: Yamandú Orsi, Carolina Cosse and Andrés Lima.
Among the main figures of the parties that achieved less support in the last National Elections are the sole pre-candidates of Cabildo Abierto, Guido Manini Ríos, of the Independent Party, Pablo Mieres and of the Intransigent Radical Ecologist Party, César Vega, while the extinct People’s Party – which lent its support to Lacalle Pou’s coalition in 2019 – is not running.
On Sunday, both the main candidates and former presidents Julio María Sanguinetti (1985-1990 and 1995-2000), Luis Alberto Lacalle (1990-1995) and José Mujica (2010-2015) and Lacalle Pou are expected to vote between the morning and the noon. At the time of closing of the polls, candidates such as Delgado, Orsi, Cosse, Ojeda and Raffo will wait for the results in their commands before moving to the headquarters of their respective parties.
EFE
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