Montevideo. Uruguay will hold presidential and parliamentary elections in October 2024. Surveys predict a good result of between 42 and 44 percent of the vote for the center-left Frente Amplio (Broad Front), which ruled Uruguay for three legislative periods from 2005 to 2020. Since 2020, Uruguay has been ruled by a right-wing alliance under Luis Lacalle Poul. Now the “Popular Unity-Workers Front” alliance is forming to the left of the Frente Amplio.
The alliance consists of three organizations, the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), Partido de los Trabajadores (Workers’ Party) and Frente de Trabajadores en Lucha (Fighting Workers’ Front). All three are coalitions of left-wing grassroots and trade union groups that, like the Frente Amplio, have taken part in elections since the end of the dictatorship in 1985. However, so far they have only achieved a small number of votes, which does not allow them to be present in parliament.
The electoral alliance addressed the public on December 27, 2023 with the statement “It’s time to unite: the People’s Unity Workers’ Front is founded.” The aim of a left-wing faction in parliament is to be a “base for the people’s struggle and the working class’s own methods”.
The text is consistent with the social measures of the Frente Amplio, which has improved the public and free healthcare system. At the same time, he criticizes the Frente as one of the political groups that were in government but are partly responsible for the fact that “the situation of the popular classes does not change significantly.”
The election campaign aims to set “wrong priorities” that “do not reflect the class contradictions”. The two grand coalitions, one of which describes itself as “republican” and the other as “progressive”, will both “maintain the agreements with the International Monetary Fund, the timely repayment of external debts, the continuity of the private pension manager Afap” and a policy “that puts the needs of the lower classes aside in favor of big capital.”
In the founding declaration, further central goals of the alliance are formulated that are “against the dismantling of the social system by the neoliberal, right-wing government of Lacalle Pou”. “We are collecting signatures and agitating for a constitutional vote to reinstate the retirement age of 60, abolish private pension managers and raise the lowest pensions to the level of the national minimum wage.”
The alliance demands “full freedom of union organization,” no regulation of union forms of action, and “no restrictions on the right to strike.” It wants to defend state-owned companies and campaign against the transfer of state institutions to private law. The left-wing alliance also aims to convert private high schools and universities into state institutes.
On the land issue, the “People’s Unity Workers’ Front” advocates land reform and expressly opposes the concentration of agricultural land in the hands of large foreign corporations. The electoral alliance generally opposes large land ownership and the use of carcinogenic agricultural chemicals. One of its goals is to protect freshwater reserves.
The communiqué advocates greater taxation of financial transactions. This includes graduated taxes for large assets. Tax exemption for big business as well as government subsidies and tax privileges in free trade zones should be abolished, the statement said.
Above all, a break with the International Monetary Fund must be made. The foreign debt should no longer be paid, but should be examined by an audit court to determine its origins and usurious interest rates.