The calm of summer, with the noise of the waves breaking in the sea as background noise, is usually a propitious moment for informal meetings of political leaders, who take advantage of the vacation break to project the year.
It is a time when the hustle and bustle of everyday life decreases, so there is more time to get together, discuss different aspects, and review what has happened in recent times.
For this reason, even though they are weekdays, along the coast there are roastswith fraternal and fermental exchanges between the leaders that give rise to the putting some ideas into practice.
Much of the above occurred this Thursday, when after a barbecue at the summer house that Senator Sebastián Da Silva has in La Paloma, the whites decided to go on the offensive and “take the troops out into the streets” to defend the government, as he learned The Observer from nationalist sources.
The meeting was attended by the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Party, Pablo Iturralde, the Minister of Social Development, Martín Lema, the Mayor of Rocha, Alejo Umpiérrez, the President of the BPS, Alfredo Cabrera, the deputies Armando Castaingdebat, Rodrigo Goñi and Milton Corbo, and the editor of the social security reform, Rodolfo Saldain.
The rochenses at the inn ✌? pic.twitter.com/2TXmRDv5LH
—Sebastian Da Silva (@camboue) January 13, 2023
At the barbecue, while they minced meat and accompanied it with wine, whiskey, coke and water, the leaders recognized “failures”, made a “critical balance” of coordination in recent months and concluded that –if they did not change– they were on their way to repeating the experience of the ’90s when “the government ate the party”a stone with which they swore not to stumble again.
The reference is due to what happened during the presidency of Luis Alberto Lacalle Herrerathe last time whites headed the government, and mistakes they made as a party since executive tasks absorbed the leaders with a consequent loss of organic life that later the hurt in the following elections, as they understand.
Therefore, with that diagnosis and that teaching, Iturralde took on the task of putting together a national tour for the first half of the year with which the whites intend “recover the center of the ring”as requested by the president Luis Lacalle Pouafter a year in which the political agenda was marked by the Broad Fronthaving as main milestones the cases of Alejandro Astesiano and Sebastián Marset. This mobilization, payment by payment, will be similar to the one they carried out for the referendum against the Law of Urgent Consideration (LUC), in the first half of 2022.
Iturralde will have a few meetings during the week and will formally propose the idea in the first board of directors of the year, which will take place in early February.
One day before this meeting in La Paloma, the main leaders of the Herrerismo (List 71) had reached a similar conclusion at a barbecue in Punta del Este at the deputy’s house Rodrigo Blas in which the former president participated Lacalle Herrerathe Minister of the Interior, Luis Alberto Heber, Senators Gustavo Penadés and Gloria Rodríguez, and the president of the Montevideo department, Laura Raffo, who has been promoted by the sector as a presidential candidate.
The Herreristas assumed that the government management is “capturing” the party and greater contact with the bases is needed, according to participants in the meeting. “The militancy is thinking about the government and that leads you to neglect the territory,” summed up one of the leaders present.
One of the objectives of this greater mobilization is “counteract the story of the Broad Front”. “It is difficult to explain the achievements of the government,” added one of the sources. In this context, they discussed the idea of starting a tour of the entire country.
The intention is to concentrate the tours in the first half of the year because the second will be more “personalized” in applications.
Diego Battiste
The National Party will begin a tour in the first semester
beyond the name of Raffothe other candidate sung among the whites is the Secretary of the Presidency, Álvaro Delgadowho has said that he is concentrating on management and that only after mid-year will he talk about “electoral issues”. In fact, this Thursday in the weekly Búsqueda, one of his closest friends, the Minister of Transport and Public Works, Jose Luis Falerosaid that he believed that this date was convenient for him to launch his campaign, and that “to be a candidate you have to leave some task”, implying that he must resign.
During the roast in the balconythe nationalists also spoke about the need for the party has a “different agenda” but complementary to that of the Executive and it was important to “fix” the achievements of the government. By way of example, they mentioned that they should have managed to highlight more how successful the Winter Plan was in Mides, since there were no deaths due to cold, or that there are 100,000 people who pay a minimum UTE rate for government subsidies, but that instead of that they were concentrated in answering about Astesiano and Marset.
As they understand, the tour of the first semester will work to explain the social security reform, which will be voted on in the Senate from February, but also to highlight economic growth, the improvement of the fiscal deficit, settlement plans, water works and sanitation, and employment indicators.
