The former leader of the PIT-CNT Uruguayan workers’ union Fernando Pereira assumed today the presidency of the opposition Broad Front (FA), with calls to reconnect the leftist coalition with the militancy on the ground and to fight against machismo to achieve a fairer society.
A month and a half after winning the in-house elections, the new president officially assumed office this Saturday in a ceremony held at the El Galpón theater in Montevideo.
During his speech, Pereira called on the members of the party to take to the streets and reconnect with the bases: “It hurts the FA that our militants find out through the press what we discussed in the governing bodies. we mean we stand in front of a camera and we say it looking at the faces of the companions”.
For this reason, he assured that “the party is going to come out and listen”. “Everyone is going to leave, and in particular the presidency. We are going to visit each department and each locality,” he said, according to the newspaper El País.
In a self-critical tone, the former union leader also referred to the “enormous damage” caused by the “macho and patriarchal” construction and urged men to change their masculinity.
“It is not enough to say I did not do it, it is not enough to say I am not part of this cultural process, it is not even enough to personally change our masculinity, it has to be a collective process and that the FA promotes it within its political force” , expressed Pereira, in the midst of the debates generated in Uruguay by the case of a woman who was the victim of a gang rape.
The leader also considered that the entry of feminism into the FA is “a political and ethical necessity.” For the new president, the leftist coalition -which governed the country between 2005 and 2020- cannot be far from a movement that he assured is “probably” the most transformative in Uruguay and Latin America.
“If we are far away, it is not worse for feminism, it is worse for the FA,” he said.
Pereira also referred to the relevance of the referendum that the opposition coalition and social movements promoted against the Law of Urgent Consideration (LUC), the backbone of the management of the government of conservative Luis Lacalle Pou, and pointed out that the main task is “to build a majority ” to repeal 135 of its 476 articles.
“There are winds that indicate that on March 27 there will be a construction of a majority and it will be a victory not of our political force, but of the Uruguayan people who defended their rights,” he indicated, while inviting the militants to knock on the doors of all the houses in the country in a “town to town” that, in his opinion, should never end.
The LUC reflects the main points of the ruling coalition’s program, covering topics as diverse as public security, education, the economy or health. Among the most questioned points of the law are the relaxation of the use of police force, the regulation of the right to strike and the declaration of illegitimate picketing carried out in public or private spaces that “affect the free movement of people, goods or services”, with the consequent power to dissolve them.
Pereira was appointed on December 23 as president-elect of the FA after he prevailed over the current deputy Gonzalo Civila and Ivonne Passada, senator between 2015 and 2020, in the elections of that political force.
With 67.2% of the votes, the current president of the opposition coalition received the most electoral support in the party’s history.
