Uruguay's Frente Amplio likely to keep majority

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Uruguay's Frente Amplio likely to keep majority

28 October 2014

In a surprise twist that defies all of last week’s projections and opinion polls, Uruguay’s ruling Frente Amplio (FA) is poised to maintain effective control over both legislative houses for the next five years. It seems that the country’s historic marijuana law is safe for now, as are other progressive measures passed by the FA majority in recent years.

Although a runoff between the FA’s Tabare Vazquez and National Party’s Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou will take place on November 30, Sunday’s vote determined the breakdown of congressional seats by proportional representation. In Uruguay the number of seats a party wins in the Senate is calculated by its share of the popular vote, while the lower house’s makeup is weighted according to the population of its 19 departments.

Last week’s polls predicted that the ruling coalition would win just 43-44 percent of the vote, but with 99.6 percent of ballots counted the FA actually obtained 47.9 percent. Not only is this result well outside the margins of error in the recent Cifra, Factum and Equipos Mori surveys, it is also above the roughly 47 percent threshold that most analysts identified as the cutoff point for keeping a majority.

The Electoral Court has yet to release the final distribution of seats, and will not do so until it finishes the current “provisional” vote count and confirms it with a second one. So far there has been no indication of when that process will be completed. Still, El Observador, Radio Espectador andRadio 180 have all reported that the FA is guaranteed 15 seats in the Senate and sure to keep its 50 seats in the lower house. El Pais claims that a source in the Electoral Court told the paper that it would take a “catastrophe” for this not to be the final result.

The most likely breakdown of Uruguay's 2015-2020 Congress, as reported in local press (Image credit: Montevideo Portal)

With the 50 seats, the FA will control the lower house just as it does now: with a razor-thin majority that will require each of its lawmakers to adhere to the party line to pass or block legislation.

In the Senate, where the FA currently has 16 seats, the results show that its new 15-member majority will be even slimmer than before. However, no other political grouping comes close to that number of lawmakers. Barring an unprecedented mix-up in the polling system, the National Party (PN) is expected to have 10 seats, the Colorado Party (PC) will have 4 and the Independent Party (PI) will pick up its first-ever senator, party leader Pablo Mieres.

Fortunately for the Frente, the Vice President also has a vote in the 30-member body. So if Vazquez wins, his running mate Raul Sendic will have the deciding vote in the Senate. And if he loses, Lacalle Pou will need every single non-FA vote to pass legislation, a tall order for a political grouping consisting of three very different parties.

For drug policy reform advocates, the FA’s unexpected success is a major victory. Lacalle Pou’s plan to present a bill to restrict the marijuana regulation law to home-growing and cannabis clubs (as well as to abolish the state registries of these) now seems doomed to fail. And the fact that the Frente won far more votes than expected also means that Vazquez, who has promised to see that the law is implemented as written, has a better shot at reaching the presidency.

The other important result of Sunday's vote is that, due in a large part to the campaign efforts of the civil society-led "No a la Baja" campaign, the ballot measure to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16 has failed. Some 53 percent of Uruguayans effectively voted against the measure by not including the reform in with their chosen ballot lists, while 46.99 percent supported it.

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