Colorado Party (Uruguay)

The Colorado Party (Spanish: Partido Colorado, lit. 'Red Party', PC) is a liberal political party in Uruguay.

Its existence can be traced back to the origins of the Uruguayan republic, in the 1830s, and since then until the late 1990s it remained the most dominant political party in the country, holding power almost uninterruptedly (alternating with the National Party, its greatest rival) until its electoral collapse in the 2004 elections, when the Party obtained only 10% of the vote. Since then, the Colorados have been able to recuperate some of their lost support, but as of 2024 they haven’t reached the 20% threshold in any of the elections celebrated in that period (2009, 2014, 2019, 2024).

Their current position in the Uruguayan political landscape is conditioned by the unofficial coalition they’ve formed with the National Party (Partido Nacional; another center-right political party, traditionally the Colorado’s greatest adversary), in opposition to the Broad Front (Frente Amplio). The Front is a leftist coalition formed in the early 1970s that has become, since the 1999 election, the most-voted electoral force in the country, reshaping Uruguayan electoral politics and displacing the Colorado Party from its traditional position of dominance to becoming the third party in the country, behind the National Party.

During the first third of the 20th century, and under the stewardship and legacy of José Batlle y Ordóñez (1856-1929), the largest sectors of the Colorado Party stood for a radical agenda of social reform, including the promotion of workers’ rights, women’s rights, statism and the ample provision of public services, democratic political reform and regular use of direct democracy mechanisms, secularization, and the establishment of a generous welfare state. During the 1940s and 1950s, led by Luis Batlle Berres (nephew of José Batlle) this Batllista wing of the Colorado Party stood also for state-led industrialization efforts and an economic dirigiste regime. In the late 1960s, though, the Party began to abandon the most radical part of that social agenda (as well as the dirigiste approach to economic matters) and now stands in the center, center-right of the Uruguayan political spectrum. Current high-profile personalities from the Party include Andrés Ojeda and Pedro Bordaberry.