The mayor of Canelones, Yamandú Orsi, who appears as one of the Broad Front candidates for the next elections in public opinion polls, was consulted about the possible contest with the secretary of the Presidency, Álvaro Delgado, who appears as the candidate of the Party National in the same polls.
In the interview for Postscript, the series of interviews conducted by Oscar González Oro for El Observador, Orsi replied that “there will be others and others (candidates) but with Álvaro I have a very fluid relationship of calling us by phone. If we meet, and disagreeing we never lose the form of respect and asking questions about life as well”.
“Uruguay is a small country where we all know each other or say that and that about the country of true closeness. It is one of the actors of the multicolored coalition with whom I am more… I am not saying closeness but it is easy for me to call and consult or present my position to him,” he added.
Do you have an opinion on Mercosur? Uruguay is being pressured in some way not to sign the Free Trade Agreement with China
Mercosur is a reality. The neighborhood is the neighborhood.
Is a reality?
Yeah. With her pain. It has worked with jumps and with many rigidities. We will have to review something but what I think is that the world is very volatile, it is not a world that is opening up, it is closing down. Alliances are very much in question, today you have two countries disputing the economy in the world. China and the United States. A Europe that has lost prominence and it is a pity to see what happens to it. An Africa that is beating there.
does not exist for the world
But it is the one that will see the emergence of a powerful middle class at some point, as happened on other continents. The neighborhood is the neighborhood and you have to have firm alliances with the neighborhood because it is what lasts. And if one also analyzes it from a commercial point of view, which is quite complicated, Brazil is a good partner. I am thinking with a very Uruguayan head. Mercosur continues to buy from us. Now has it malfunctioned? I think so. Let’s see what happens, for example, to an Argentine citizen when he comes to visit Uruguay and gets stuck at customs.
I have traveled Europe by car with my children in the last year and nobody asks me for a paper.
I don’t think it has to do so much with Mercosur but with internal policies and how one concretes those things. Anyway, I think you have to throw strings around the world. Now, I can’t imagine it without the region. I think about it with a very Uruguayan head, we are a country of three and a half million inhabitants, but our neighborhood is 200 million. Here I am just thinking about the south itself and not all of Argentina, not all of Brazil. I’m thinking of southern Brazil and Buenos Aires. Even if one thinks about it only with an economic head, it is powerful. And there is something that has to do with culture that you have to get much more juice out of, which is with the issue of values. If you have traveled Europe, you are changing borders and you are changing languages. Here, except for Portuguese, we speak the same language, there is nothing more similar to an Argentine than a Uruguayan in the world.
