Broad Front (Uruguay)

The Broad Front (Spanish: Frente Amplio, FA) is a political coalition in Uruguay. Since 2025, it has been the ruling party of Uruguay, having previously ruled from 2005 to 2020 and has produced three presidents: Tabaré Vázquez (2005–2010; 2015–2020), José Mujica (2010–2015) and Yamandú Orsi (2025–present). Since 1999, it has been the largest party in Uruguay's General Assembly.
The Frente Amplio was founded in 1971 as a coalition of over a dozen fractured leftist parties and movements. The first president of the front and its first candidate for the presidency of the country was General Líber Seregni. The front was declared illegal during the 1973 military coup d'état and emerged again in 1984 when democracy was restored in Uruguay.
Progressive Encounter (Encuentro Progresista) was formed in 1994 by several minor independent factions and the Frente Amplio. EP and FA started contesting elections jointly under Encuentro Progresista - Frente Amplio. Later, another force, Nuevo Espacio, became linked to the front. Thus, it began contesting elections as Encuentro Progresista - Frente Amplio - Nueva Mayoria.
In 2005, member organizations of Progressive Encounter and New Majority (essentially Nuevo Espacio) merged into the front, and the coalition took the name of the larger force, Frente Amplio. Previously, EP and later NM had been allied with FA but organizationally separate structures.
The alliance is formed by:
Starting with the election of Luis Alberto Lacalle of the National Party in 1989, economic reform designed to modernize the country quickly began, which led to a devaluing of the peso and laws protecting banking secrecy. This secrecy led to Uruguayan banks becoming a place to launder money from drugs and other illegal businesses. By the turn of the century, half the nation had to survive in the informal economy. In 2002, the economic crisis of Brazil and Argentina spread to Uruguay, which crashed due to lacking productive power. In August of that year, the nation received 1.5 billion US dollars from the IMF to try and help with the crisis. This was the state of the country when the Broad Front began campaigning for the 2004 election.
The Broad Front firmly established itself as the country's third major political force at the 1994 election. Its presidential candidate, Tabaré Vázquez, who replaced longtime leader Seregni as the party's standard-bearer, finished with the most votes of any individual candidate. However, under the Ley de lemas system, Vázquez was denied the presidency because the Broad Front finished with the third-most votes of any party, behind the Colorados and Blancos. At the time, the highest-finishing candidate of the party winning the most votes was elected president. At the same time, the Broad Front surged to 31 seats in the Chamber of Representatives and nine in the Senate.
The Ley de lemas was scrapped for presidential elections in favor of a two-round system for the 1999 election. Vázquez led the field in the first round but lost the runoff to the Colorados' Jorge Batlle after the two traditional parties set aside their long rivalry to defeat him. At the same time, the Broad Front became the largest party in the legislature.
The party's victorious 2004 campaign was the first instance of a left-leaning party gaining the majority in Uruguay. Two major reasons the party took power in 2004 were a substantial movement towards more moderate policies and their support of an increased welfare state, creating a bond with working-class people tired of the neoliberal practices of the end of the twentieth century.
When Tabaré Vázquez first took the position of president with a Broad Front majority in the Uruguayan General Assembly, he quickly moved to strengthen diplomatic relations with other Latin American countries, including Cuba. Important to the future success of the party is the US$100 million anti-poverty program that Vázquez signed early in his career, which helped to ensure the support of the lower class in future elections. Uruguay required economic reform when Vázquez stepped into power in 2005, as it was struggling to recover from the crisis of 2002, with a third of the country still below the poverty line. An important aspect of the economic development was the new Minister of Economics and Finance, Danilo Astori, who worked to create a good relationship with the IMF and obtained the foreign investment needed to kick-start a paper pulp industry. Economic reform was also highlighted by a change in the immigration policy of the US president and increased beef exports to the European Union.
Since gaining power, the party has maintained the electorate's support, as analysis of the 2009 election has led to some conclusions that the trust in the stable government played a large part in keeping the Broad Front in power. After the 2009 election, former guerrilla José Mujica became president, and during his time in power, he passed several leftist social policies. The legalization of abortion, same-sex marriage, and marijuana all occurred under the second consecutive Broad Front majority in the federal government. As noted above, Vázquez vetoed a bill to decriminalize abortion in 2008, but the party as a whole was more supportive of the legalization. Support for legal abortions was universal within the party by 2012 when all party senators voted in favor of a new bill that decriminalized the procedure within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. In April 2013, same-sex marriage was passed, supported by the party, which took a hard-line stance against the role of the church in legislation on the matter. The most recent major change under the Mujica presidency was the legalization of marijuana, which he signed in December 2013. A point of consideration for this event is that legalization was not supported by the general population, but the Broad Front still chose to act in favor of it. The economy continued to grow with Astori transitioning from Minister of Economics and Finance to vice president, a position he used to continue advertising Uruguay as a safe place for foreign investment.
The Broad Front supported the re-election of Tabaré Vázquez in the 2014 election, which Vázquez won with 56.5% in the second round, defeating the National Party's candidate Luis Lacalle Pou. During his second mandate, Vázquez faced strong criticism from the opposition because he refused to cut political ties with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro despite allegations of violations of human rights.
The Broad Front supported Daniel Martinez for the 2019 general election. Martinez arrived first in the first round but was defeated in the run-off by Luis Lacalle Pou of the National Party (also endorsed by the Colorado Party and Cabildo Abierto). The Broad Front was defeated at the polls for the first time in 15 years. The party also lost its majority in the Chamber of Representatives and the Senate while remaining the largest party in the General Assembly.
After a period out of government and as majority opposition in the General Assembly, the Broad Front pushed three candidates for the primary elections: former intendant of Salto Andrés Lima, former Intendant of Montevideo Carolina Cosse, as well as their peer from Canelones Yamandú Orsi. However, only Cosse and Orsi were relevant to the electoral contest. The first is a left-leaning politician, more aligned with socialist democratic values, supported by the most left-wing sectors of the coalition, such as the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. In contrast, the second one has presented himself as a fully centrist, pragmatic candidate who tends to engage more in dialogue with the opposition, supported by the largest sector of the front led by the Movement of Popular Participation, which represents the most right-wing faction of it.
With Orsi winning and the party amassing 42.22% of all valid votes, a ticket with Cosse was immediately announced the same night of the primaries, ratifying a previous decision to assemble a formula that would comply with gender parity. During the first round of the election, the formula was the most voted yet again, monopolizing 43.86% of the votes and achieving a majority in the Senate without the need to secure the vice president's seat. However, it fell two seats short of a majority in the Chamber of Representatives.
However, due to electoral law and failing to secure more than half of the votes, the election went to a second round between Orsi and the candidate of the National Party, Álvaro Delgado, who counted with the political support of the rest of the parties that formed the governing Republican Coalition as well as Eduardo Lust, from the Environmental Constitutional Party. The Orsi-Cosse formula would nonetheless gather the support of minority leaders within the parties that form the coalition, with Zaida González Legnani of the Colorado Party and Victor Björgan of the National Party announcing their support on the days preceding the second round in November.
Despite polls showing parity between the two formulas that took part in the second round, the Broad Front formula would beat their opponents by a margin of 3.9%, with Delgado quickly conceding the election as Orsi vowed to become a president "who calls again and again for national dialogue to find the best solutions."
On 1 March 2025, Yamandu Orsi took office as Uruguay's new president, meaning the Broad Front, returned to power after a five-year interruption.
In its history, despite attracting political factions from other parties over time, the Broad Front has also suffered some splits as well:
The Broad Front consists primarily of progressive political parties, defined as Artiguist, popular, democratic, anti-oligarchy, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchy. In economics, it tends to follow social democratic policies with expanded social programs. It has major internal factions characterized as social-liberal, Marxist, communist, and eco-socialist. However, not all the parties in the Broad Front lean left. Indeed, some minor factions are more fiscally or socially conservative. Uruguay Assembly of Danilo Astori and New Space of Rafael Michelini can be considered centrist parties. Astori has followed fiscally conservative policies as finance minister, whereas the Christian Democratic Party is vocally anti-abortion.
In 2004, the first internal elections for EP-FA-NM were held. Previously, elections had only been held within FA.
Under the electoral system in place at the time, called the Ley de lemas system, each political party could have as many as three presidential candidates. The combined result of the votes for a party's candidates determined which party would control the executive branch, and whichever of the winning party's candidates finished in first place would be declared president. This system was used from the 1942 election to 1994 until, in 1996, a referendum amended the constitution to restrict each party to a single presidential candidate, effective from the 1999 election.