I'm surrounded by political parties!

Within three blocks of my house there are 6 offices of political parties. They’ve almost all appeared in the last two months. It’s getting pretty scary because the elections are more than a year away. At this rate every other storefront will have it’s own political party office.

The most amazing thing is this, there are only four real political parties in Uruguay and they all have offices within 3 blocks of my house. Many factions within a party have their own offices. There is the Colorados and the Blancos, the two traditional parties each of which have two offices here. Then there is the partido independente, which has one office. The latter is a ex.Social Democratic party which split from Frente Amplio (the large leftist party) because they wanted to drop the social(ista) part of their ideology.

In Uruguay the largest political is Frente Amplio. It’s a popular front type broad left party very similar to PT in Brazil or the US Communist Party in the 1930’s. The closest Frente Amplio offices is 3 blocks away and has been around for much longer than the other parties which just setup shop for the elections. Frente Amplio has 19 parties within the party. The factions all have a long history and it’s hard to figure out sometimes. For example, before the dictatorship there was a movement Tupamarus, which tried to make an armed revolution. They were jailed and crushed, but while in jail they had a split, one faction remained MLN Movimiento de Liberacion National and the other became M26 Movimento de la 26 de Marzo (marking the first public event of Frente Amplio on March 26th 1973.) How the managed to meet and discuss things and have enough coherence to have a split while in jail, i don’t know, but they had 13 years, so i guess that helped.

MLN ended up joining as a part of MPP which is the Movimento de Participation Popular and is now the second largest faction of Frente Amlio. The largest and most conservative faction is Vertiente Artiguista, they don’t even publicly support legalization of abortion. It’s the faction which will have the most power if / when FA wins the upcoming national elections. The one cool thing about how the factions function in Uruguay which isn’t possible other places is the system of voting. Each sub-party has it’s own number, so you can vote for exactly the faction you want. Then if that group has enough votes they get representation. If not the votes count for the party in general. It avoids the ‘wasting’ your vote syndrome, or cases where almost everybody votes for candidates of party x, but because there is only one candidate of party, they win the election with much less support because their vote isn’t split.

I’m sure that i’m going to have people posting comments saying, yes, but the Uruguayan system isn’t that good. Frente Amplio will sell out, they are institutional, blah blah blah…. A lot of the autonomist leaning activists here vote null refusing to participate in a corrupt and false democracy. But hell, Uruguayan democracy functions a lot better than the gringo variety.