Another new governor has been born. In this electoral year, in which most of the provincial leaders will debut in office or return after a period of impasse, San Juan, the land of Sarmiento, was added to the list of districts that will have new administrations. The character in question is Marcelo Orrego, who entered politics in 2001 as a collaborator of Roberto Basualdo, a historic leader from San Juan who summoned him to work in the Chamber of Deputies as soon as he graduated as a lawyer and became one of his most important mentors.
Orrego emerged victorious in the provincial election on Sunday the 2nd thanks to the alignment of four key factors. The first was the alliance of his party with the PRO and radicalism. Orrego belongs to a provincial force called Production and Work, which is the second in San Juan, but he always stayed halfway when it came to building alliances with macrismo and radicalism. This year they got it.
The second factor was the division of Peronism between Sergio Uñac and José Luis Gioja, which dragged both towards a defeat, more damaging for Uñac, whose candidate -his brother- came third. Tied to this is the third factor, which was the Supreme Court ruling that prohibited Sergio Uñac from running again as a candidate for governor. It was for this reason that he chose his brother José Rubén, who did not pull the votes as expected.
The fourth element, and perhaps the most complex to measure, is the wear and tear effect of an electorate that has been governed by the same party for twenty years. The people of San Juan have known the Gioja and the Uñac since 2003. Gioja ruled the province from that year until 2015. In his last period, the vice president was Sergio Uñac, but in the previous turn -between 2007 and 2011- the same The position was held by José Rubén Uñac, the brother who competed this time against Orrego and finished third.
Orregofacts. Orrego was born in Santa Lucía, a city of about 50,000 inhabitants 15 minutes from San Juan Capital. It is considered part of the urban agglomerate known as Greater San Juan. In the Orrego house they were members of the Peronist party. His father was the provincial Minister of Human Development in the 1990s, during the governorship of Jorge Escobar, and his grandfather was also a well-known provincial leader.
When Orrego graduated as a lawyer in Córdoba, he was summoned by Roberto Basualdo to work in the Chamber of Deputies as an adviser. There he lived closely the creation of Basualdo’s provincial party and also the four times that his political chief ran as a candidate for governor and lost against Peronism. They were the elections of 2003, 2007, 2011 and 2015. He came second in all of them.
Orrego during those years made a parallel career. In 2005 he returned to the province to seek the mayor of Santa Lucía. He first ran in 2007 and lost, but four years later he had his revenge. In 2015 he was re-elected and after completing the two terms he passed the post to his brother Juan José. A mirror that anticipates the future of the government? For that there is a long way to go, before there is the re-election of 2027.
In 2019, after Basualdo’s four consecutive defeats, it was Orrego’s turn, who ran against Uñac and lost, but he was not left out of the system, because he reserved a place on the list of national deputies, a position that he still today he retains and that he will leave at the end of the year to assume the governorship.
Basualdo’s role in Orrego’s career is key. He is the one who wove the agreements with the PRO and radicalism and also the one who today acts as the guarantor of those arrangements to keep the alliance with Juntos Por el Cambio together. Basualdo has been a senator since 2005 and this year his term expires. He has already warned that he will return to San Juan to rest for a few seasons and prop up his Production and Work party, which came to power for the first time.
The mirror that Basualdo and Orrego look at is the provincial hegemony achieved by parties such as the MPN in Neuquén, led by Jorge Sapag, Juntos Somos Río Negro, with Alberto Weretilneck, or the Concord Renewal Front in Misiones with Carlos Rovira. Very close, in San Luis, Claudio Poggi has just won, who also put together his own party called Avanzar.
Orrego got what his political godfather couldn’t. And, as of December 10, the new project will be to work for re-election.
