The Republican Coalition has everything to win in 2029 except one thing: leaders willing to win. The voter has already spoken. A 69.6% of those who voted for the National and Colorado parties in October 2024 want a single slogan for the upcoming national elections, and only 12.5% oppose it. This is not a trend or a nuance: it is a mandate. And the response from the opposition leadership to that mandate has been the same since they lost the government: commissions, lukewarm statements, and meetings with the Broad Front to distribute oversight positions in agencies and public companies.
It must be said without anesthesia. The leaders of the coalition parties do not consolidate the common slogan because it does not benefit them, not because it does not benefit the country. Eduardo Lust summarized it with an honesty that is almost a provocation in Uruguayan politics: they refuse to consolidate the coalition because "they do not want to lose one position or another." That is the phrase. Everything else—the "aspects to evaluate," the "advantages and disadvantages," the "complexity" of the issue—is the wrapping that disguises a self-serving calculation.
What is being protected
A single slogan implies a common internal competition. A common internal competition implies that the departmental structures, the usual lists, and the usual operators compete against others and can lose. And there lies the knot. The leader who already has their seat, their position on a board, their share of power in the current agency, does not want to risk it in an open competition with a Colorado, a National, or an independent who could take their place. They prefer a Uruguay governed by the Broad Front with their own interests intact rather than a governing coalition where their interests are at stake.
No one should be fooled: the permanent dialogue with Orsi's government is not institutionalism or "republican spirit." It is the most comfortable way to be in opposition without paying the cost of being so. Oversight positions are negotiated, seats in agencies are distributed, votes in the Senate vary according to each party's convenience, and the coalition that was created to defeat the FA becomes what the Front itself already calls it to its face: "the oppositions," in plural, a set of parties that moves according to their circumstantial interests.
