Once again, despite the fact that President Luis Lacalle Pou tried to distance himself from the concept of the “story” when taking stock of his second year in office, the opposition charged the inks against what it understands as a “parallel reality”. The president of the Broad Front, Fernando Pereira, was the only spokesman to make a counter-narrative to the president’s speech before the General Assembly this Wednesday.
The dissertation this Thursday in the Huella de Seregni –after the analysis of the Executive Secretariat of the political force– dealt with the same line in which several leaders had expressed themselves the day before leaving Parliament: the nuances before the expressions of economic recovery and the omissions to different topics.
“We live very different realities,” Pereira insisted again at a press conference. “I don’t know what a police officer or a teacher might think when they hear that they didn’t put their hand in their pocket, if in the first year of government they lost 19 wages in the year,” he declared, referring to Lacalle Pou’s controversial statement regarding because “the economic plans were fulfilled and the Uruguayans did not reach into their pockets”.
Pereira assured that retirements and pensions fell in two consecutive years and criticized that since the beginning of the pandemic “popular pots have swarmed throughout the country.” The president of the left-wing coalition criticized in turn the reduction of the VAT refund on purchases with electronic means, which at the beginning of the administration went from 4% to 2%. “And isn’t that purchasing power of working men and women, retired men and women? We understand that it is and that the speech omitted the majority of working men and women,” he said.
The Broad Front again appealed to the price of a dozen eggs, a kilo of minced meat, a liter of oil and the cost of fuel to relativize the optimistic forecasts of the ruling party. “That’s what people see when they go to the supermarket or fill up gas with their salary,” he said. “This is what Uruguayans feel when they see their government stating all the good things that went well for them and on the other hand looking at their house and seeing how their quality of life has worsened,” he attacked.
Pereira claimed that the situation of the port of Montevideo had not been mentioned after the criminal complaint of the Broad Front and the observations of the Court of Auditors. “What is the explanation of the government on this very deep issue, which is neither more nor less the exit door for Uruguayan products?” He asked himself.
The president of the political force also questioned the highlights to the extraordinary income of UTE when there was “not a mention of the energy transformation during the last three governments of the Broad Front.” “Yesterday’s message from the president ignored the main needs of the people, which are their economic income, it ignored the circumstances of thousands and thousands of families who ate in soup kitchens,” he criticized.
At the end of his initial dissertation he noticed the “scourge of domestic violence”, one of the crimes whose denunciations had not diminished. Pereira maintained that it is “a revealing fact of the violence” of the men that has to be corrected immediately,” he emphasized that “it is not an anecdotal circumstance” and concluded: “It is time for us men to take charge.”
“Surprisingly, the social security reform was left out of the speech, when it was said that it was one of the main reforms of the government,” raised, and indicated that “that priority probably disappeared” as a result of the appearance of the 800 thousand signatures against the Law of Urgent Consideration (LUC), and predicted that this project “is sleeping until after March 27”.
Pereira stopped in turn in the monthly adjustment of fuel prices, especially in the months in which the government froze them despite the fact that the Regulatory Unit for Energy and Water Services (Ursea) suggested otherwise. “If the LUC will be bad, they don’t apply it to defend it,” he settled.
