The woman almost pounces on the truck that makes the last stretch route from Rio Branco before entering Melo and Yamandu Orsi He asks to stop the march. It’s Friday night and the desperate lady shows her little girl, wrapped in a blanket in her arms, who had convulsed on the side of the road.
Behind the truck, in which, in addition to the mayor of Canelones, are among others the deputy Alfredo Fratti and a former Colorado leader named Javier Gandolfo, a white Kwid also turns on the beacons, which the woman will get on. at the wheel goes the former candidate for the Presidency, Daniel Martínezwhich starts at full speed towards the hospital in Melo.
The former vice-chancellor Nelson Fernández is co-pilot and Sebastián Camacho travels in the back seat –a monsignor of the Old Catholic Church on the Hill who became known when his militancy in the referendum against the LUC led the Catholic Church (of a similar name) and Cardinal Daniel Sturla to disassociate themselves– that he has some medical knowledge to notice that the girl is already stable.
The unusual episode interrupts a tour of Cerro Largo that seems to have its minutes numbered.
–I’m going to have to do you bad, you have to make it super short because we are running out of time –the “Canario” Fratti had kindly told a veteran countryman in the Lake Merín base committee, an hour and 108 kilometers ago back.
The distances in Cerro Largo are long and the local militants want his photo or a word hand in hand with the future Broad Front (FA) candidate, rushed by his people to leave for the next town. Greetings and the same strict times apply to the one who was in the same place less than four years ago, and this is his first election campaign outing since his last two defeats: for the presidency in 2019 and for re-election in the Mayor’s Office of Montevideo (IM) in 2020.
Daniel Martínez, blamed by his detractors on the left for losing the government, assures that he returned from the “base”.
–We believe in the Frente Amplio project, not in the fights and speaking ill of the other, that must be banished… That is indeed a utopia!
The comment in Lago Merín, which from 2025 will be erected in the 16th municipality of Cerro Largo, unleashes the laughter of about twenty of those present in the Asilu Maceiro committee.
R. Mudfoot
Daniel Martínez and Yamandú Orsi in a base committee in Lago Merín
Orsi goes around each town saying that the FA cannot “afford to lose colleagues” with experience, such as “Daniel, who was mayor, industry minister, president of Ancap”…
And senator! -they delimit him.
The head of the MPP maintains that “it is an honor and a pride that I am dating” with him, “because it is a long process” and “history has shown” that the Front was excited to reach 12 municipalities when it already governed eight, and that did not happen. “You win or you lose, and if you have to lose, you go ahead and leave your partner there,” he ironized. “First of all, we have to be companions, in the green ones and in the ripe ones, we have to know how to walk together”delimits.
“It is a natural tendency to hold people responsible for triumphs or defeats, when the processes are more complex”declares to The Observer. “In 2018 they told us that we were barely above 30%, and we said that it was nonsense. What happened later, with whichever candidate it was, had to do with that 30%,” he recalls of a fateful first round in the that the left, accustomed to parliamentary majorities, got less than 40%.
“When the primaries did not exist, we could say that the apparatus was wrong. (But) the public is summoned in June to choose candidates from each sector, and the FA did that. Obviously the campaign has a lot to do with the result, but also the management of a government and the action of the political force. Now, how many elections did Tabaré Vázquez lose? At least a couple”claims.
Three days after the slap of the first round in 2019, Martínez announced to the leadership that he would put the mayor of Canelones at the head of the command, who at that time enjoyed good approval in his department and who had come to authorize the MPP a year before. to handle his name as a presidential candidate, although he later dropped out. The Harmony between both mayors at the beginning of 2018 had even made us think of a formula for the elections.
The former candidate is now aligned behind the candidate who at this point has the most advantage in the polls. Martínez says that “the person matters a lot” and repeats everywhere that he did not meet Orsi in politics, but when his daughter and his partner met in a choir.
“I trust him, we share the Congress of Mayors, a lot of stories, the campaign for the ballotage. (…) Orsi is the MPP, no one is going to discuss it, but it transcends the MPP. In the FA I have no enemies, I am one of those who hurts in my soul… ta, things that are done between colleagues”, he tells The Observer.
The “Pelado” already has his sublemma “Don’t give up” registered in the Electoral Court, a procedure that, as a political sector of the FA, was carried out by the País group (list 52), reconstructed The Observer. El País reported on meetings with the former mayor to put together the structure, which already features Fernández, Camacho (who gathered 11,000 votes in the last departmental elections) and the former head of the UAM, José Saavedra.
“We are with the people in the neighborhoods and in the interior we are beginning, already with adhesions but calmly,” describes the former mayor, who for a while continued to score (low) in the intention of spontaneous voting in some polls. “For now we are working to add votes to Yamandú in the internal. Later, life will tell,” he says.
R. Mudfoot
Daniel Martínez, Javier Gandolfo, Alfredo Fratti, Daniel Aquino and Yamandú Orsi
Now the agenda of tours began, which after the outburst of the route resumes the schedule with a meeting at the Departmental Table of the FA in Cerro Largo.
Deputy Alfredo Fratti’s voice breaks and he is moved when it is his turn to speak, he looks at Martínez to his right.
– A guy who was a candidate for president, who goes down to the military, is an example.
The command
As soon as the nocturnal meeting begins, heated by the wood stove, Orsi tells the Arachana leadership “an anecdote that they will know how to understand.” The mayor speaks of Pueblo Bolívar, a town in the municipality of Tala where in 2005 the Venezuelan Hugo Chávez went “to inaugurate a little bridge.”
“Since we entered in 2005 and we put a lot of energy into that little town against the Santa Lucía river. And I don’t forget anymore, a fellow director of Works, Juan Tons, says: “As FA we have to win the Bolívar ballot box with everything what we did”. (…) And you know that we always lost”, recounted the mayor to the hilarity of those present, in a round in which, among others, the MPP senator, Charles Carrera (visiting), the former socialist senator, listened Yerú Pardiñas and the head of the Department, Daniel Aquino.
“And one day the mayor of Tala tells me, a caudillo who died not so long ago,” Orsi reconstructs Mario Pérez about the target: “‘You are wonderful, you don’t understand anything. I’m always going to beat you in Bolívar.’
-And so?!
–All Bolívar voters are from Toledo.
-As?
–What the Bolívar ballot box says comes from elsewhere.
“There were the families of Bolívar who always got their credentials in Tala. And we never understood when we were campaigning. It never occurred to me to ask where they had their credentials,” Orsi concludes with a laugh.
Camilo Dos Santos
Daniel Martinez and Yamandu Orsi
He makes the anecdote, which he acknowledges “has nothing to do with anything”, to emphasize that “the four companions” mentioned as possible pre-candidates –along with Carolina Cosse, Mario Bergara and Andrés Lima– should make themselves “known and see their faces” with the militants from all over the country, as well as with those who are not in the “bubble” of politics.
About a month ago, the different sectors aligned with his candidacy formed a command that began to analyze surveys and think about profiling for the campaign.. The group is coordinated by the emepepista Camilo Cejas and has held two meetings at the headquarters of the Vertiente Artiguista in the center of Montevideo, as he learned The Observer.
Notable among its members are Carrera and Heber Bouzes for the MPP, and Gandolfo for La Patriada, a space created to attract leaders of other parties and which in the sectors further to the left of the FA observe with distrust.
Gandolfo himself was colored, came to share a field with Jorge Batlle at the height of Capilla de Cella -both shared a love of horse racing- and today plays a leading role from a low profile in the assembly of an orsist structure at level nationally, sources from the environment indicated The Observer.
The tour of Cerro Largo is organized, in fact, by La Patriada, and the former white leader Esteban Vietta also travels with Orsi, who defines the MPP leader as “a gaucho.”
“The barriers that separate us between political groups are not insurmountable,” Orsi said at an event in Melo on Saturday at noon, where he stopped by to greet former vice president Rodolfo Nin Novoa, who in 1994 joined the Vázquez Progressive Meeting as a former nationalist mayor.
“It’s not a matter of fishing in the fishbowl, but rather going out onto the field, but at the same time seeing what things are happening outside our tent and that some knock on the door and want to come closer”, he stated the night before, in a more first-round strategy than avoiding a “competitive” front-line internalas diagnosed by Equipos.
“The vote of the Cabildo Abierto (in 2019) was a miracle and today obviously those ordinary people I am sure are thinking twice. It is more difficult to imagine it with the National Party, but there is also. And the Colorado Party that does not end resolve the electoral offer and the name that appears in the first place is not even militant. The situation is for us to do the job that we always knew how to do: reach people with our truths, an attitude of generosity and openness, “he proclaims.
in dialogue with The Observerredouble the bet: “The FA has the possibility of capturing those who are disenchanted with the multicolored coalition”.
