Leaning on a cane and in poor health at 89 years old, José “Pepe” Mujica reflected for a moment on his future when voting in Sunday’s presidential runoff in Uruguay.
“I personally have nothing more to wait for,” the former president said slowly before cameras and microphones. “My future, the closest, is the cemetery, for reasons of age.”
The phrase announces a near end to the extraordinary political cycle that Mujica has gone through for more than half a century, in various stages: from Tupamaro guerrilla to tortured prisoner, from legislator and minister to president admired in the world.
Last Sunday he seemed to conclude another chapter by getting his leftist project to go beyond his figure with the election of his dolphin, Yamandú Orsi, as the new president of Uruguay with 49.8% of the votes.
own Orsi recognized the importance that Mujica had in his electoral victory when visiting him and his wife, Lucía Topolansky, on their farm on the outskirts of Montevideo this Monday.
“One has to be grateful, because what these veterans did has been very important to me,” said Orsi, who at 57 years old belongs to a new leftist generation that comes to the government in Uruguay.
It has not been an easy act for Mujica, who saw other possible political heirs fail before getting his way on Sunday.
An old concern
President of Uruguay between 2010 and 2015, Mujica has given clear signs of concern about the continuity of his political strength when he is no longer here..
In fact, generational change is something he has been thinking about for years.
“We old people can serve to create a shadow and not give way, or we can serve to help new people exist; I am in the latter,” Mujica told BBC Mundo before the 2019 elections, in which he ruled out seeking a new mandate despite his popularity.
The following year, he resigned from his senatorial seat due to the risk that the Covid pandemic posed to him due to his age and that he suffers from a chronic immunological disease.
And on the night of October 2022 when his friend Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was once again elected president of Brazil, Mujica warned in another conversation with BBC Mundo from the Brazilian’s bunker in São Paulo that his “weak point” was the succession.
“What is there after Lula?” he asked. “Men pass and the causes remain. That’s a problem we all have. And really in recent years I have seen historic matches disappear in France, Italy and elsewhere. What is happening is not simple.”
Although the replacement of leaders is usually a challenge for any political force regardless of its ideology, in Latin America the left has shown particular difficulties in doing so.
In some cases, leftists who became president in the region sought to stay there without opening space for new candidates.
In other cases, the chosen successors lost at the polls or led governments that ended in crisis, as happened to Kirchnerism in Argentina.
And, sometimes, the Dolphins’ election of strong left-wing leaders opened bitter disputes within their parties, as occurs in Bolivia with the fight between President Luis Arce and his predecessor Evo Morales.
By the way, other left-wing presidents were able to pass power without visible trauma to their elected officials, as the Mexican Andrés Manuel López Obrador did this year with Claudia Sheinbaum.
But Mujica’s case seems special because he is out of the government, overcoming arduous treatment for esophageal cancer, and despite this he played a key role in Orsi’s victory by actively campaigning for him and against the coalition candidate. center-right in power, Álvaro Delgado.
“The big theme”
Mujica had contemplated other possible political heirs in Uruguay after leaving the presidency in 2015 with global fame for his anti-consumerism preaching and for measures approved during his mandate, such as the legalization of marijuana and abortion.
For the government that followed his, he supported Raúl Sendic, son of one of the leaders of the Tupamaros guerrilla organization that Mujica joined in the 1960s and 1970s, as vice president.
But Sendic’s promising political career collapsed with his resignation from the vice presidency in 2017 amid allegations of corruption and a subsequent conviction for abuse of office and embezzlement.
Mujica also promoted the candidacy of his own wife, former senator Lucía Topolansky, as mayor of Montevideo, but she lost the municipal elections in 2015 with another co-religionist from the Frente Amplio, the leftist coalition that they both make up.
That electoral defeat of his life partner was a sign for Mujica of the difficulties of delegating votes, no matter how popular he was.
“The great theme of great political leaders is always their successors”Uruguayan historian Mónica Maronna tells BBC Mundo.
“The electoral flow of the sectors and leaderships is not permanent, it is not transmitted mechanically.”
However, Mujica continued to promote generational renewal and the emergence of new figures in the Popular Participation Movement (MPP), the force that he created in 1989 with other extupamaros.
One of those rising figures was Orsi, who met Mujica three decades ago when he was a member of the MPP in his native department of Canelones, bordering Montevideo.
With their strong support, Orsi was elected mayor of Canelones in 2015 and re-elected in 2020, and he resigned from the position last December with high approval ratings to launch his successful presidential candidacy.
The former president also attracted people outside professional politics to his group, such as Blanca Rodríguez, a former TV news host who was elected senator in October.
Thus, without already having Mujica on its lists, the MPP received a historic vote in October that consolidates it as the main group of the Frente Amplio, with nine senators in a chamber of 30 for the next legislature and 36 deputies in a total of 99 .
While Orsi lacks Mujica’s charisma, “He is a good heir” of this and his school, with common characteristics such as pragmatism and commitment to political negotiation, says Adolfo Garcé, a professor of Political Science at the University of the Republic, in Montevideo.
It remains to be seen what role Mujica will play in the Orsi government that begins in March.
The president-elect said this Monday, after visiting him, that Mujica “has the wisdom not to ask you things as advice, but to ask you what his experience was.”
He also denied that he had suggested names for the cabinet.
“He would put together what he sees fit,” Orsi noted, “but He also tells me that I am going to be the president and I have to decide“.
Whatever the future, everything indicates that the dilemma of political inheritance is moving away from Mujica’s concerns.
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