1,495 one-hour meetings across the country leave “raw material” the magnitude of a big data that not everyone knows how to drive. The content obtained from the tours of the program The Front listens to youcomparable to hundreds of focus groups, is managed with reservations in the left-wing coalition.
“Strategies are not discussed, they are made,” sociologist Gustavo Leal, coordinator of this initiative, usually repeats. Next week he will resume visits to Flores and Florida, to complete a second stage that totals 1,700 meetings since the start in May. from last year.
“We want to have a collage as broad but representative as possible of different voices on the themes of society”said the manager to The Observerwhile the left-wing coalition finalizes the details for a first draft of the program that it will put on the public agenda for the 2024 campaign.
“This stage is finished to complete the closure of the four questions: the main problems that the organization (interviewee) has; the main problems of the sector, the expectations they have of Uruguay in the next two years and the main mistakes they believe that had the Broad Front as a government,” said Leal.
The sociologist himself had justified months ago that deploying the main references of the opposition in the territory, for long days without massive acts or events of great media notoriety, responded to it being “a experience lived by people who are going to have a high position in an eventual FA government”.
broad front
Plenary of the Broad Front
“Now the departments for the second tour are going to be completed and preparations are beginning for the third, which is going to have some innovation, because issues of the FA program are going to be considered,” he explained.
“A national tour of the FA talks and listensfor talk no longer about these questions that were asked, but about what are the relevant aspects that the FA program has to incorporate”. “It is a listening parallel to the internal discussion process,” he said, while the organic debate will run from August until the prelude to the December Congress.
The commission chaired by the former director of the Office of Planning and Budget (OPP), Álvaro García and the former mayor Ricardo Ehrlich, has already received the summaries of the 32 thematic units of the political force –which vary from Environment and Sports to Economic Development and Education– and is preparing to present the first global draft by June 30, and thus be ratified by a Plenary on July 15.
The president of the Front, Fernando Pereira, indicated days ago in the internship that this program has to “define five or six strong ideas to defend everywhere and establish as political priorities towards the resolution of Congress.”
The head of the opposition also proposed to the Political Table to schedule a meeting with all the pre-candidates – Today it is the mayors Yamandú Orsi, Carolina Cosse and Andrés Lima and Senator Mario Bergara who are in the race – to deliver the program and exchange together with the commission responsible.
Gustavo Leal defends that the system aimed to avoid “biases” when choosing meetings: “One tends to choose the one they know,” he gave an example. The interviews varied by various levels and themes throughout the country: “On housing issues, it was crossed from a businessman in the sector to a housing cooperative to work groups from the Faculty of Architecture,” he said.
The bases of Montevideo suggested distributing a draft of the program for the third stage of tours that will begin at the end of June, and consulting the organizations interviewed in the territory: “Which do you understand the emphasis of the next government should be?”, and “what waiting” for upcoming frontline efforts at the national, departmental and municipal levels. Fernando Pereira considered it “acceptable”.
Gustavo Leal will continue to lead his role in the structure after the file arranged by prosecutor Sabrina Flores for the investigation that her predecessor Gabriela Fossati had started in the Astesiano case. Her visit to the parents of the former presidential custodian in Rocha earned her questions from all sectors of the Broad Front for considering it a political mistake in the midst of the case that had managed to make a dent in the government of Luis Lacalle Pou.
The Socialist Party even proposed that the sociologist stop representing the political force both The Front listens to you as in the interparty table on security, but the organic one did not support the proposal.
