David Nelson, CEO of Global Business Policy and former U.S. ambassador to Uruguay: “The result of the referendum preserves the complete ‘omnibus’ set of reforms that President Lacalle Pou and his coalition in the General Assembly approved in 2020, their first year in office. Opponents of the reforms, led by the labor unions and the leftist Broad Front coalition, had hoped both to roll back 135 of the 426 provisions in the omnibus and to demonstrate a loss of popular support for Lacalle Pou, thereby diminishing his power over the remainder of his five-year term. Remarkably, the results demonstrated that he has maintained roughly the same narrow margin of support by which he won the election in 2019. This partly reflects approval of his handling of Covid-19. The country has an 80 percent vaccination rate and experienced a strong economic recovery last year, with growth of more than 3 percent expected for this year. It also demonstrates a degree of support for the reforms in question–affecting security and protections for police, labor union power and a bit of deregulation in state-owned enterprises…”