The Only Public Office with the Status of a Republic

A critique of Gabriel Oddone’s management, public spending, and rising debt under Yamandú Orsi’s government

THE ONLY PUBLIC OFFICE WITH THE STATUS OF A REPUBLIC
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

In 1960, Mario Benedetti, in El País de la Cola de Paja, wrote: “If my intention were to give this chapter a satirical tone, I would have to begin by saying that Uruguay is the only office in the world that has attained the status of a republic. But I do not know to what extent it would be legitimate to make light of one of the darkest and most dramatic aspects of our national life.”
And Gabriel Oddone, in El declive, states: “the inhabitants of Uruguay are to a large extent responsible for the decline.”
One became a socialist to promote his books; the other is now in charge: today he is, the myth of the expert pilot in economic growth.

When technocracy kneels before the committee
There is a dangerous fallacy in believing that a degree in economic history and decades of consulting from corporate towers immunize a technocrat against the implacable logic of unhinged political power.
Before the runoff election, the illusion was sold that Gabriel Oddone’s presence at the Ministry of Economy would be the anchor of common sense, the containment barrier against corporatist excess and the redistributive delusion of a coalition sustained by collectivist mythologies.
Reality has proven infinitely harsher.
Far from acting as a “left-wing liberal” reformer —an oxymoron by which he describes himself— willing to bring order to the spending debacle and serve as a champion of growth, Minister Oddone operates trapped in a paralysis as sterile as it is damaging.
He is useless at containing wasteful spending or restraining a ministerial militancy detached from any arithmetic reality, living in the fantasy of infinite resources.
Oddone does not govern; he “administers other people’s guilt.” He manages an inertial deficit and validates borrowing that is pushing the country dangerously toward the threshold of 65% of GDP.
He turns economic policy into a public-relations consultancy designed to satisfy his communist political clientele, forgetting an elementary democratic detail: in October, the overwhelming majority of Uruguayans did not vote for the Broad Front.
They placed their trust in Yamandú Orsi under the implicit promise —and the mirage— that an independent technical team would impose order and realism in the face of the abyss represented by his program; as Vallcorba pointed out.

The tragedy of spontaneous order trampled underfoot
As Friedrich Hayek warned, social order is not built from the office of an enlightened bureaucrat who believes he can plan scarcity, but through the decentralized signals of individual responsibility and strict respect for the rules of the market. The eternal wisdom of the person who decides to spend his money on what he needs, thereby indicating what matters to people, or what is unnecessary.
When the State becomes a placement agency to sustain the party superstructure and satisfy unrestrained trade-union corporations, economic calculation simply disappears.
Decisions about what to spend on and why no longer respond to efficiency or scarcity, but to factional pressure.
Here arises the inevitable question that exposes the farce of the administration:
How would Gabriel Oddone have paid the salaries of nearly 5,000 new public employees, the money allegedly intended for disadvantaged children, welfare for several hollowed-out corporations, and the multimillion-dollar price of the “María Dolores” tribute-estate if the markets had not lent him that money?
The answer is the stark X-ray of intertemporal irresponsibility: he could not have paid for it.
He financed it artificially through serial borrowing whose real bill will be sent, without anesthesia, to the children born in this 2026, who, if they do not emigrate, upon reaching close to 30 years of age in 2060, will carry on their shoulders the weight of this unsustainable waste.
A minister truly useful to the interests of the nation does not negotiate the foundations of indispensable solvency, passing the bill on to citizens who voted for the MPP and the PCU. He takes a stand, resigns, and denounces it.
By choosing decorative permanence, Oddone validates a system in which the surviving taxpayer, the unemployed, and the entrepreneur at risk of shutting down finance someone else’s disorder.

The weight of illusion and the market’s awakening
The market, unlike political committees, does not negotiate with narratives.
The persistent rise in debt and fiscal indiscipline are not accounting abstractions: they are the silent tax on Uruguayans’ future. Every point of GDP added because of the inability to cut privileges, perks, and multiplied political-public structures translates into a higher financing cost for that greater and unbearable level of spending, less genuine investment and, ultimately, the suffocation of the private sector that produces and sustains the spending and its interest payments.
The excuse of the “expert pilot” has vanished.
What remains exposed is a manager useless for the fundamental task of setting limits on the parasitic state Leviathan as it grows, a prisoner of a narrative that promised moderation and surrender in exchange for fiscal impunity.
When the ideology of spending prevails over raw arithmetic, collapse is not a technical possibility; it is a mathematical certainty.
Uruguay is the only office in the world that has attained the status of a republic; and under the Orsi-Oddone duo, it runs the risk of shutting down.

Public spending and debt
Gabriel Oddone’s management
Fiscal responsibility

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