In her eagerness to mimic Tabaré Vázquez and praise him to, among other things, rank behind her the votes that the late former president orphaned, the mayor of Montevideo, Carolina Cosse, seems willing to make the same mistakes she made his political mentor.
Perhaps one of the unhappiest phrases of Vázquez in his long and successful political career was the one he released during the 2014 electoral campaign in which he described the sayings of his rival Luis Lacalle Pou as “soap bubbles”, causing a cataract of militant jokes in which the white leader was linked to ephemeral soapy images.
That same Lacalle Pou, whom Vázquez and a good part of the left were unable to decode and who he was constantly botijeando, already embodied a change that materialized five years later, putting an end to fifteen years of the Frente Amplio government.
However, Cosse seems to have learned nothing from that contempt that cost the left dearly. This Sunday, the mayor of the capital resorted again to Vázquez, whom on repeated occasions paid tribute to him. He did so by targeting Lacalle Pou after the president announced that he will speak on radio and television to defend the Urgency Law that will be decided at the polls on March 27. First Cosse said that the president is within his right to star in the chain and that this should not be the axis of the discussion. And then he pointed out: “Here what we have to discuss is why we have to repeal the 135 articles and why we have to vote yes. The need as a country and as a democracy to vote yes. In the middle there are different bubbles of soap that can distract us”.
Once again the strategy of underestimating a rival who, in the current circumstances and after two years in office, maintains high approval ratings among Uruguayans. Probably Cosse points to the hard core of the Frente Amplio, the one that will be essential to win the internal one that will catapult her to a presidential candidacy.
But with her recurring strategy of throwing the hook into the fishbowl on the left, the mayor of Montevideo seems to forget that later she will have to undertake a bigger catch where the simplism and contempt of the adversary may not be such an easy sale.
Once the Broad Front believed that the alleged “pituco de La Tahona” could be a piece of cake. The stone is still there and, apparently, there are leaders of the left wanting to stumble again.
